There is no single “Africa is behind” or “MENA is ahead” story. Both regions contain markets moving at radically different speeds. There are multiple regional stories, and the closer you look, the less geography explains outcomes. Capital, aggregator access, settlement infrastructure, and institutional decision-making speed explain far more.
A useful, if imperfect, reference point: in the US market, ARC’s 2025 settlement data showed leisure travel agencies growing their share of NDC transactions from 11 percent in 2024 to 16 percent in 2025, with corporate agencies moving from 4 percent to 7 percent. Online travel agencies still took the remaining 77 percent, down from 85 percent a year earlier. That is a mature, well-capitalized, GDS-saturated market where the shift is measured in single-digit percentage points a year. It is not a description of Africa or MENA, where the underlying market structures are different enough that a single continental or regional adoption curve tends to mislead more than it informs. It is useful mainly as a baseline for how slow this transition is even where every structural precondition, capital, aggregator density, GDS infrastructure, favors the traditional agency.
Africa is not one NDC story, it is at least five
The industry habit of citing South Africa’s NDC penetration as a proxy for the continent’s progress is a distortion, not a shortcut. South Africa’s distribution infrastructure was inherited from decades of corporate travel volume and Amadeus-anchored agency consolidation that does not exist anywhere else on the continent at comparable depth. Using it as the African benchmark makes the one market built to look advanced stand in for markets with nothing like its foundation.
Break the continent apart and the constraints differ by region, not by a single readiness score. In short: East Africa has airline momentum but limited ecosystem depth. West Africa has airline ambition but agency constraints. Francophone Africa has barely entered the NDC conversation. North Africa has airline scale without a coherent retail strategy. In detail:
- East Africa has carrier conviction but narrow reach. Kenya Airways sequenced its NDC rollout deliberately, aggregator first through Verteil, then a GDS surcharge, then mainstream GDS reach via Amadeus, and Ethiopian Airlines became the first airline globally to onboard onto ARC’s Transaction API. Both are credible. Neither has solved distribution reach beyond their own networks, and almost nothing else in the region is moving at comparable speed.
- Anglophone West Africa has the opposite problem. Air Peace is expanding capacity faster than nearly any carrier on the continent and has a multi-year NDC-ready distribution deal with Travelport in place. The constraint is not the airline. It is the agency tier several layers downstream, still absorbing currency volatility and payment experimentation, that has to actually sell that content into new markets.
- Francophone West and Central Africa has barely entered the conversation. Verteil, Accelya, Amadeus, and TPConnects have concentrated their African expansion in the south and east over the past eighteen months. Agents in Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Senegal, and Gabon are largely operating on GDS contracts that were never built with their market in mind, and have had no real exposure to an NDC aggregator at all.
- North Africa is capacity without strategy, sitting next to a region building from zero. Royal Air Maroc has no public NDC distribution strategy. EgyptAir, despite carrying more capacity than almost any airline on the continent, has exactly one live aggregator relationship (via TPConnects’ Iris platform) and no GDS NDC integration. Nile Air, a private carrier with no long-haul network, is running NDC simultaneously across three platforms, Amadeus NDCX, Verteil Direct Connect, and PMI Flight, and is technically the most advanced of the three despite being the smallest.
The agency-survival implication is that “African readiness” is the wrong unit of analysis. An agency’s prospects depend on which of these environments it sits in, not on the continent it operates on.
MENA’s split is not simply Gulf versus North Africa either
The instinctive framing, Gulf carriers building retail airlines from scratch while North African carriers still sell tickets, holds directionally but oversimplifies once you look at the carriers rather than the region. Riyadh Air launched full commercial service with NDC distribution through Amadeus and an Offer and Order platform built with FLYR already live on day one, a more complete stack than EgyptAir has assembled across decades of operation. Saudia and Etihad are pulling their domestic agency communities toward NDC-first workflows because the commercial incentive and the capital exist locally.
But North Africa itself splits three ways, not one. Nile Air’s simultaneous three-platform NDC build is arguably more technically aggressive than anything a Gulf challenger has done, driven by the narrow commercial logic of Egypt-to-GCC diaspora routes rather than by scale. EgyptAir has the capacity but only a single aggregator relationship and no roadmap beyond it. Royal Air Maroc, despite genuine tourism momentum, has nothing public at all.
The Gulf’s advantage is not simply greater investment. Airlines there are redesigning commercial operating models around modern retailing from inception, while much of North Africa continues to treat NDC as another distribution channel rather than the foundation of airline retailing. The distinction matters because one approach changes commercial strategy; the other primarily changes connectivity. The pattern across MENA is the same one visible in Africa: institutional decision speed and aggregator access predict outcomes better than region or even airline size.
What this means for agencies trying to survive the transition
Three factors show up consistently across every regional story above, regardless of continent:
- Aggregator access remains the single clearest differentiator. Agencies connected through a Verteil, TPConnects, or comparable aggregator layer can absorb multiple airlines’ NDC implementations through one integration instead of building bespoke connections carrier by carrier. Kenya Airways built its own NDC rollout around this logic explicitly, telling its agency network that going through the aggregator first is faster than escalating directly to the airline’s NDC helpdesk.
- Settlement infrastructure, not booking technology, is the harder problem for African and MENA agencies specifically. Under NDC, the airline increasingly becomes the merchant of record, replacing settlement models built around the Billing and Settlement Plan (BSP) that many African and MENA agencies still depend on for working capital. For a well-capitalized TMC with treasury operations, adapting to direct billing is a project. For an agency operating on thin credit lines with no independent access to the payment infrastructure NDC assumes, it is closer to an existential question than a technology upgrade.
- Collective structures are emerging, but they are regional advocacy bodies more than commercial pooling arrangements. AESATA, the Association of Eastern and Southern Africa Travel Agents, now represents 13 national travel agent associations and gives member agencies a shared advocacy channel on aviation regulation and technological disruption. That is a meaningfully different model from the host-agency and consortium structures that let independent US agents absorb the 1990s commission-cap shock through pooled purchasing power. Nothing quite equivalent to the US host-agency model exists yet at scale across Africa or MENA, which means individual agencies are more exposed to capital and technology requirements than their US counterparts were during the last comparable distribution shock.
Scale compounds every other challenge. Large multinational TMCs can spread integration costs, treasury management, and technical expertise across dozens of markets. Small independent agencies, which make up most of the agency population across both regions, cannot. For many of them, adopting NDC is not primarily an IT project. It is a capital allocation decision made under significant financial constraints.
The next competitive divide may not be between agencies that adopt NDC and those that do not. It may be between agencies that become part of broader distribution ecosystems and those that continue operating as standalone businesses. As more airlines shift toward Offer and Order retailing, access to shared technology, settlement infrastructure, and commercial partnerships could matter more than geography itself.
None of this is unique to emerging markets in kind. It is the same logic that has governed every distribution shift since GDS deregulation. What is specific to Africa and MENA is how unevenly capital, aggregator infrastructure, and institutional decision speed are distributed, not just between regions but within them, sometimes between two airlines serving the same country. The agencies that survive the NDC transition will not be the ones in the “right” country. They will be the ones closest to where aggregator access and settlement flexibility already exist, wherever that happens to be.
