The Lufthansa Group announced this week that half of all its indirect bookings now flow through NDC. When direct channels are included, Lufthansa says 77.5% of total bookings are now handled outside the traditional EDIFACT-based indirect distribution environment. For a carrier group that encompasses Lufthansa, Swiss, Austrian Airlines, Brussels Airlines, and Eurowings, this is a structural threshold, not a milestone to be revisited.
The significance is less the percentage itself than what it implies: Lufthansa is now treating NDC as the default commercial channel and EDIFACT as the environment that is gradually being exited, not the other way around.
Speaking at an industry briefing in Sydney on Thursday, Lufthansa Group head of Regional Sales South-East Asia Brendan Shashoua was direct about where the airline now stands. NDC, he said, is no longer optional. It is the foundation of how the group goes to market.
That clarity of posture matters. It signals that the era of NDC as an experiment, something to be piloted, tested, and debated internally, is over at Lufthansa Group. The airline is now optimising within NDC, not towards it.
The corporate gap that was closed
The headline figure obscures a more instructive story. Lufthansa’s own assessment is that leisure travel proved the easier segment to shift. Corporate travel required a different approach: one that could accommodate approval workflows, expense management integrations, and the reporting requirements that travel management companies impose on behalf of their clients.
The corporate breakthrough did not happen on its own. It required active collaboration with TMC partners and technology providers to close the functional gaps that had kept corporate buyers anchored to EDIFACT. That process, Shashoua noted, took dedicated effort over a sustained period.
The result, according to Lufthansa: NDC bookings now generate an average of three times the ancillary attachment rate compared to legacy bookings, and travellers accessing NDC-enabled content were seeing savings of more than 10% through dynamic pricing and differentiated fare families. These are commercial outcomes, not technical ones.
What this means for the African distribution conversation
African carriers are not Lufthansa. That is not a criticism. It is a structural observation that shapes what 50% NDC penetration means as a reference point.
Lufthansa Group built its NDC capability over several years, with the full weight of internal technology investment, a large and mature distribution partner ecosystem, and GDS relationships that, whatever the tensions, gave it leverage to negotiate. It also had the volume to compel GDS providers and TMCs to prioritise NDC compatibility.
Most African carriers do not hold that leverage. Ethiopian Airlines is generally viewed as the region’s most advanced large-network carrier in modern distribution, but most African carriers are operating with smaller indirect volumes, less mature agency tooling, and far greater dependence on traditional GDS workflows. Kenya Airways, RwandAir, Air Peace, and others are working from that position: limited NDC tooling across agency ecosystems and, in some markets, GDS dependency that remains near-total.
What the Lufthansa milestone does establish, however, is that the corporate adoption problem is solvable. The approval workflow and expense management barriers that held back corporate NDC adoption in Europe were real, not theoretical. They were addressed. The European experience demonstrates that those workflow barriers are addressable, though the implementation path will differ across markets.
For African carriers building NDC programmes today, the lesson is less about matching Lufthansa’s percentage and more about sequencing the same problem correctly: close the functional gaps first, bring TMCs into the process early, and accept that leisure and corporate transitions will move at different speeds.
The Offer and Order signal
Shashoua also flagged that Lufthansa Group is already positioning beyond NDC, towards Offer and Order, the architecture designed to replace the fragmented PNR, ticketing, and EMD structures with a single customer record. This is a longer horizon, but it is the direction of travel.
For African and MENA distribution stakeholders, this creates a useful framing: NDC is not the destination. It is the infrastructure that makes everything that follows possible. Carriers that delay NDC adoption are not simply missing a feature. They are deferring entry to the retailing architecture that the industry is building toward.
The Lufthansa number is 50%. Most African carriers are working through single digits, or not yet reporting publicly. The gap is real. So is the path.
Travel Distribution News covers airline distribution, NDC, and travel technology across Africa and emerging markets.
