Why African Carriers Are Moving Slowly on NDC

The standard is thirteen years old. The business case is proven. The technology is available. The bottleneck is none of these things.

Slow NDC adoption in Africa is routinely explained as a technology problem. It is not. The real constraints are financial, commercial, and institutional, and they reinforce each other in ways that make technical solutions, on their own, irrelevant.

That framing matters, because the industry keeps offering the wrong remedies. More certification programmes, more aggregator outreach, more standards updates: none of these move the needle for an airline that cannot afford the implementation, operates routes without competition, and sells into an agency market that cannot receive NDC content. The problem is structural. So is the solution.

Slow does not mean uniform. Kenya Airways, Ethiopian Airlines, and FlySafair have made verifiable progress. KQ’s GDS surcharge architecture, Ethiopian’s dual go-lives with ARC Direct Connect and Accelya FLX Select in late 2025, and FlySafair’s live integration through TPConnects’ Iris platform are genuine milestones. Those carriers made deliberate commercial decisions, not just technical ones, and the results reflect it. They are the exception. Across the rest of the continent, most carriers have not crossed the line from intent to execution.

Every NDC programme begins with the passenger service system. NDC requires an airline to own and control the offer: to build dynamic bundles, serve rich content, and manage post-booking servicing through an API. For a well-resourced European carrier, integrating NDC with a legacy PSS is expensive but manageable. For a mid-sized African airline running a legacy system with a constrained IT team and limited capital, it is a multi-year undertaking competing directly with fleet maintenance, route operations, and regulatory compliance.

The PSS vendor relationship deepens the problem. In most cases, the PSS governs not just reservations but inventory management, departure control, and interline settlement. Renegotiating those terms takes years. Switching systems is an event so operationally disruptive that most carriers defer it indefinitely. Providing a PSS to an airline functions, in practice, as a long-term commercial lock-in, because the cost of leaving is prohibitive. African airlines are not exempt from this dynamic. They are more exposed to it, because the leverage larger carriers use to force PSS vendors to open their architecture, primarily traffic volume and global distribution agreements, is harder to deploy at smaller scale.

IATA’s own 2025 Annual Review found that even the most advanced NDC airlines globally are still in the setup phase, with many others not expected to begin their Offer and Order transition until 2028 or 2029. African carriers are not starting from the same position as those leaders. The gap is wider than the industry typically acknowledges.

NDC is a medium-term investment with a short-term cost profile. The infrastructure build, the API development, the agency enablement programme, the internal retraining: all of it requires capital expenditure that yields returns over years, not quarters. Major African carriers, including Ethiopian Airlines, Kenya Airways, RwandAir, and Air Mauritius, have spent the past two years managing soaring fuel costs, fleet constraints, and geopolitical instability simultaneously. That is not a backdrop that supports a multi-year distribution transformation.

When an airline is managing cash week to week, the business case for NDC gets deferred. Better yield, lower distribution cost, and ancillary revenue uplift are compelling arguments in a boardroom with space to consider them. They lose to fuel hedging and hard-currency liquidity every time.

The geopolitical dimension adds pressure that outside observers routinely underestimate. The closure of Sudanese airspace has forced Kenya Airways and other East African carriers onto longer, fuel-burning detours costing millions in additional operating expense annually. RwandAir lost access to DR Congo airspace in early 2025, suspending routes to Abuja, Brazzaville, and Cotonou. Airlines managing disruptions of that scale in real time are not running NDC programmes in parallel. The operational firefighting crowds out the strategic, and the strategic only returns when the operational stabilises.

Where NDC has accelerated, airlines were responding to competitive pressure. Lufthansa Group implemented GDS surcharges to force channel migration. American Airlines moved significant content exclusively to NDC, compelling the agency community to adapt. In India and the Maldives, NDC penetration has already exceeded 80 percent in some channels. These are markets with aggressive airline retail strategies and distribution ecosystems capable of absorbing the transition.

Most African markets present the opposite dynamic. Where a carrier operates without meaningful competition on a route, which describes a large share of African intra-continental flying, there is no distribution pressure to optimise. The passenger will fly regardless of whether the booking flows through an EDIFACT GDS transaction or an NDC API call. The GDS fee is a cost, but a manageable one when no competitive threat forces harder thinking about distribution economics.

NDC is a tool for building distribution advantage in competitive markets. In monopoly markets, there is no distribution advantage to build. That single distinction explains more about the pace of African NDC adoption than any technical argument.

NDC adoption is a two-sided problem. An airline can build complete NDC capability and still drive no meaningful volume if the distribution ecosystem cannot receive the content. In South Africa, which has the continent’s most developed agency infrastructure, only 35 percent of agents reported that their NDC adoption had grown in a recent industry poll. That is a market where Amadeus Southern Africa ran dedicated enablement workshops throughout 2025. The numbers in less developed markets are materially worse.

Outside of South Africa, Kenya, and a small number of other markets, the agency landscape is largely made up of small, under-resourced TMCs and retail agencies with neither the technical capacity nor the commercial incentive to invest in NDC integration. Without capable distribution partners on the other side, the best-built NDC API generates nothing. African airlines developing NDC capability risk constructing a channel that the market is not yet equipped to use.

The OTA layer presents the same constraint. Globally, OTAs account for 77 percent of all NDC transactions and have been the primary adoption driver everywhere the standard has scaled. Africa’s OTA infrastructure, outside of platforms like Wakanow in West Africa and Travelstart in southern Africa, is thin. The ecosystem required to absorb NDC volume at scale does not exist across most of the continent, and that removes one of the most powerful levers for driving adoption.

Many African carriers that have begun NDC implementation have done so without a distribution strategy behind it. Airlines that treated NDC as a technology project rather than a commercial one have spent five or more years sitting in the low single-digit percentages of channel shift. A certification mark and a live API with minimal traffic are not NDC adoption. They are the precondition for it.

An NDC programme without a channel pricing strategy, an aggregator partnership model, and a credible agency incentive framework is not a distribution transformation. It is a capability on a shelf. Airlines that underinvest after go-live see adoption plateau within months, and many African carriers with partial implementations are sitting precisely in that position: technically live, commercially inert.

The carriers that have moved share one characteristic: they treated distribution as revenue architecture, not as back-office cost management. That is the strategic posture that produces results, and it is available to any airline willing to make the commercial decisions that follow from it.

Three things shift the dynamic for African carriers.

Financial stabilisation comes first. Airlines managing operational survival cannot simultaneously run transformation programmes. Debt restructuring, government recapitalisation, or meaningful route profitability improvements are not peripheral to the NDC question. They are prerequisites for it. Asking financially distressed carriers to invest in distribution modernisation is asking them to solve the wrong problem first.

Route competition comes second. When more African routes open to multiple carriers, which SAATM has promised but not yet delivered at scale, distribution optimisation becomes a genuine commercial lever rather than a theoretical one. IATA has estimated that opening just 12 key African markets would generate over 155,000 jobs and more than one billion dollars in annual GDP. It would also, as a direct consequence, create the competitive conditions that make NDC rational for a far larger share of the continent’s airlines.

Aggregator infrastructure built for the African context comes third. The cost and complexity that make NDC integration prohibitive for small African agencies is precisely the problem that NDC aggregators exist to solve. Integration through an aggregator can be completed in weeks rather than months, and aggregators can extend NDC access to agencies without IATA accreditation or their own ticketing infrastructure. The expansion of aggregators including TPConnects, Verteil, and AirGateway into African markets is not a complementary development. It is the supply-side infrastructure that the continent’s NDC transition depends on.

Africa’s NDC adoption will not be unlocked by technology. It will be unlocked by competition, capital, and distribution maturity.

When those conditions shift, adoption will not be gradual. It will be immediate.

Travel Distribution News covers airline distribution, NDC, GDS dynamics, and travel payments with a focus on Africa and emerging markets.