The story of NDC distribution in Africa is usually told at the global level, folded into wider claims about carrier count, agency reach and airline adoption. But those numbers tell us surprisingly little about how the market is actually developing on the ground. TDN asked three of the market’s aggregators, AirGateway, Verteil and TPConnects, for figures specific to Africa rather than global totals. What came back is not a simple leaderboard, but three different approaches to building NDC distribution across the continent.
Carrier coverage
Verteil currently has 27 airlines live and ticketing across the Africa region. Of these, 7 are Africa-based carriers, including North Africa, with one more airline ready to go live. AirGateway’s African footprint looks different in shape. Airlink is the only Africa-based carrier live on the platform today. Ethiopian Airlines is in the final stage of certification and is expected to go live within the coming week or two. Qatar Airways and EgyptAir remain on AirGateway’s roadmap for the rest of 2026, without a confirmed live date.
Both aggregators also route Africa-relevant volume through global carriers serving the region. AirGateway says agencies serving Africa rely heavily on carriers based in Europe, the Middle East and the Americas alongside African carriers, and puts its total active carrier count for these agencies at more than 35. The company also runs a standing fee-waiver program, in place across all its markets with no plan to change in the foreseeable future, that currently covers Airlink, Emirates, Turkish Airlines, Singapore Airlines, Etihad, Air Europa, Finnair and LOT, with Ethiopian Airlines set to join once live. Agencies booking these carriers through AirGateway do not pay a transactional fee on the platform side.
TPConnects, through its Iris platform, lists the largest number of African carriers of the three, though the list mixes two different kinds of connection rather than a single standard of coverage. EgyptAir is live with full NDC content across domestic and international routes. A cluster of low-cost carriers, including AeroLink, Air Arabia, Auric, FlySafair, Grumeti Air, Lift, Renegade Air and Safarilink, are live with LCC content spanning East, West and Southern Africa. Ethiopian Airlines is described as going live imminently, Airlink and Cape Verde are in integration, and Kenya Airways sits in the pipeline. TPConnects also brings in Africa-relevant volume through global carriers on Iris, among them Emirates, Etihad, Qatar Airways, Lufthansa, Brussels Airlines, Turkish Airlines and Oman Air.
On carrier depth specifically among Africa-based airlines, TPConnects and Verteil both show a wider footprint than AirGateway, though the three companies are not counting the same thing. Verteil’s seven live African-based carriers reflect direct NDC integrations. TPConnects’ list mixes a smaller number of full NDC integrations with a larger number of LCC content connections, a different kind of coverage than NDC alone. AirGateway’s single live African-based carrier looks narrow by comparison, though its near-term addition of Ethiopian Airlines and its fee-waiver structure represent a different kind of commercial pitch to agencies rather than simply a smaller footprint.
Agency and customer reach
Verteil reports more than 350 agencies signed up for its Africa solution, with over 500 IATA numbers activated across its airline partners. AirGateway says more than 50 IATA agencies are based in Africa, while over 550 IATA agencies globally access its content through the platform, a number the company says includes consolidators who distribute in and serve the African market. The company also reports live IATA customers in production across 12 African markets, with South Africa among its top five markets globally. TPConnects says South Africa is currently its biggest market, with Egypt also an active market through its General Sales Agent partnership, covering two airline customers, AirCairo and EgyptAir, on its Astra product line. The company says it is actively extending Iris further across the region, including new GSA representation in East Africa, specifically Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, as well as Ethiopia.
Volume trends
All three aggregators point to growth, and their figures came with different levels of precision and different underlying measures. AirGateway’s headline figure is a 46 percent year-on-year rise in bookings from its Africa-based agency customers in Q1 2026 versus Q1 2025, which the company says was its strongest quarter on record in the region, independent of the routes or carriers those agencies sell. Measured over the full first half of the year instead of a single quarter, January through June 2026 against the same months of 2025, the growth rate is roughly 12 percent, a figure AirGateway says reflects the strong quarter averaged together with softer months. TPConnects reports its own growth over a different period, January to August 2025 versus the same months in 2026, and on a different basis: 192.8 percent growth on Europe to Africa routes, and 167.7 percent growth in Africa-originating NDC bookings, both measured by route rather than by agency. Verteil described its transaction volumes over the same broad period as steady, without offering a comparable percentage, and said it expects volumes to increase as more carriers activate on the platform.
These figures are not directly comparable in an apples to apples sense. Beyond the different measurement windows, AirGateway’s figures track bookings made by its Africa-based agency customers regardless of route, while TPConnects’ figures track bookings on specific routes regardless of who made them, a seller-based measure against a route-based one. None of the three companies disclosed the base volume against which their percentages are measured, so TDN is presenting each company’s figures as reported, on the basis each company defined, rather than treating them as directly comparable measures of scale.
Reading the numbers
All figures here were supplied directly by AirGateway, Verteil and TPConnects in response to TDN’s questions, and none have been independently verified against a third-party source. The carrier and agency counts are specific enough to be treated as current, dated claims by each company. The volume figures sit on different footing from each other: AirGateway’s 12 percent and TPConnects’ growth figures are stated, bounded numbers, though measured over different windows and without a disclosed base, while Verteil’s characterization of “steady” volume with expected growth is a qualitative claim rather than a measured one. Readers should weigh the three accordingly rather than ranking them on a single scale.
The broader point is that NDC coverage in Africa is not a single metric, however often it gets reported as one. At least three separate dimensions are visible in these figures: the depth of direct NDC integration with African carriers, where Verteil currently has the strongest disclosed footprint; the breadth of overall airline content, where TPConnects’ mix of NDC and LCC connections gives it the widest list; and commercial reach and terms, where AirGateway’s fee-waiver structure and TPConnects’ GSA expansion model shape how cheaply and how far that content actually gets distributed to agencies. A single carrier count collapses these three into one number and, in doing so, hides which strategy actually fits a given agency’s book of business.
