Kenya Airways announced today that it has selected Branchspace, a boutique travel technology and consulting firm, to deliver the ecommerce and digital retailing layer behind Project Kifaru, the airline’s ongoing transformation programme. The announcement was coordinated with Sabre: Kenya Airways’ own press release on the deal is titled “Kenya Airways, Sabre and Branchspace Collaborate to Offer a Smarter and More Personal Travel Experience,” making clear this is a single, three-way retailing initiative rather than two vendors making separate claims about the same day. Branchspace’s Triplake platform will become KQ’s primary digital touchpoint, giving commercial teams direct control over personalised offers across every customer channel, while a parallel transition to full Offer and Order infrastructure continues underneath it. The release frames this as a deliberate sequencing choice: retailing capability first, full modern distribution architecture later, rather than waiting for one to unlock the other.
The detail that matters most for the industry sits in a single line of the announcement. Branchspace’s ecommerce layer is being delivered “jointly alongside Sabre PSS.” Kenya Airways is not just modernising its storefront. It is also replacing its underlying passenger service system, and Sabre is the vendor doing it.
That connection is confirmed directly by Sabre, which published its own release the same day. The new platform will replace the system that has run Kenya Airways’ reservations, ticketing, inventory management and airport check-in for more than two decades, and the airline will adopt Sabre Mosaic Offer Optimisation as part of the move, bringing dynamic pricing and continuous learning to how it prices and personalises offers. “This partnership marks an important step in Kenya Airways’ retailing transformation,” said Julius Thairu, the airline’s Chief Commercial and Customer Officer, in Sabre’s release. Sabre’s Niklas Andréen, Chief Commercial Officer for Airline Technology, framed it as reflecting growing carrier confidence in modular technology that unlocks value now while building toward a full offer-and-order model.
The system being replaced is worth noting. Kenya Airways’ April 2025 move into NDC distribution ran on Amadeus’s Altéa NDC, the NDC module of Amadeus’s core Altéa PSS suite, suggesting the underlying reservations system Sabre is now taking over was Amadeus. If so, this is not simply a new vendor win for Sabre. It is a PSS switch away from an incumbent, in a region where Sabre’s own leadership has argued that Amadeus leverages its PSS position to slow rival Offer, Order, Settlement and Delivery providers. Sabre has been active elsewhere in East Africa this year too: on August 11, 2026, it announced that Air Tanzania had selected SabreSonic PSS and Sabre Mosaic NDC IT to migrate its core passenger operations, a separate deal that gives Sabre a second significant regional PSS win inside a matter of weeks.
This is also not Kenya Airways’ first move into modern distribution. In April 2025, the airline became the first Sub-Saharan carrier to distribute NDC content through the Amadeus Travel Platform, with content rolled out to travel sellers in Kenya, South Africa and the UK. The Branchspace and Sabre announcement is not KQ discovering NDC or modern distribution for the first time. It is a further step toward a retailing architecture that gives the airline more direct control over the customer-facing offer, on top of distribution capability it had already put in place, and now on a different underlying system than the one that capability was built on.
It is worth being precise about what “Project Kifaru” actually is. It is not a new name coined for this retailing initiative. It is Kenya Airways’ broader turnaround plan, launched in February 2022, covering financial restructuring, fleet strategy, and operational recovery, under which the airline returned to profitability in 2024 for the first time in over a decade, reporting an after-tax profit of KES 5.4 billion against the prior year’s KES 22.6 billion loss. The airline has more recently referred to the continuation of that plan as Project Kifaru 2. The Branchspace and Sabre work is better understood as a new workstream inside an existing, multi-year recovery programme rather than a standalone digital initiative.
The other claim worth stress testing is positioning. Branchspace’s release describes Kenya Airways as “the first airline in Africa, and an early SkyTeam member, to adopt modern airline retailing.” That framing needs some qualification given how far Ethiopian Airlines has already moved on the same front. Ethiopian holds IATA Level 3 NDC certification with Offer and Order management capabilities, has been running NDC transactions through Accelya’s FLX Select, became the first airline to integrate with ARC Direct Connect using ARC’s new Transaction API, and has its own partnership with Sabre to implement SabreMosaic Airline Retailing. Kenya Airways may well be first to combine a Sabre PSS migration with a dedicated ecommerce layer delivered from day one in the specific way Branchspace describes, but a blanket interpretation of the “first in Africa” claim is difficult to reconcile with Ethiopian Airlines’ existing NDC and Offer & Order capabilities.
None of that diminishes what Kenya Airways is doing. Pairing a PSS replacement with an immediate, standalone retailing layer, rather than waiting for the underlying migration to finish, is a sequencing decision more African and MENA carriers are likely to face as legacy PSS contracts come up for renewal over the next few years. Deploying retailing ahead of the full technical transition, rather than gating it behind one, creates the possibility of demonstrating commercial impact before the underlying systems work is complete, though that outcome is not guaranteed. Kenya Airways, whatever the precision of the “first” claim, is positioning itself as a test case for that approach in a market where the pressure to modernise has so far outpaced the infrastructure available to do it.
