Ethiopian Airlines and Airlink now reach agents through several aggregators. The fine print, the agencies that speak publicly and AFRAA’s Secretary General all point to the same gap between a live connection and access an African agency can actually use.
On 16 October, Ethiopian Airlines put its NDC content live on AirGateway. The announcement set out what agencies can do there: shop, hold or ticket, pay by cash or credit card, and handle voids, refunds and rebookings in one workflow. It did not say how many African agencies can use it, or how many have tried.
Airlink’s story is similar. Since 2024 it has placed its content on at least four aggregation routes. Those are connections, and airlines like to count them. The figure that decides whether they matter is how many agencies book through them, and almost nobody publishes it.
Airlink has four routes, and the agent still has to choose
Travel News reported in May 2024 that Thomalex would be Airlink’s first NDC aggregator. A CAPA brief records AirGateway in November 2025, Travel And Tour World reports NDC Gateway in August 2026, and VoyagesAfriq coverage has Aeronology live shortly before the Ethiopian announcement. Each route makes sense alone. Together they leave an agency choosing among interfaces and commercial terms, in a market where, according to an ASATA survey cited in that coverage, 82 per cent of South African advisors name managing multiple platforms as one of their biggest daily challenges.
That survey covers all platforms, not only NDC, but it describes the working day each new route lands in. Travelstart Group CEO Andy Hedley put the cost bluntly in June 2025: airlines had used NDC as a weapon against the GDSs, and agents were “the ones left carrying the can.” He added that airline systems still respond slowly on many routes, and that when NDC is slow, agents go back to the customer with EDIFACT results.
The fine print speaks of accredited agencies
The eligibility language is narrower than the headlines. AirGateway’s boilerplate in the Ethiopian release describes more than 550 IATA-accredited agencies across over 60 markets, a global figure with no African breakdown. Coverage of Airlink’s NDC Gateway integration speaks of IATA-accredited agencies connected to that platform. IATA’s own guidance says BSP services for NDC sales are available to accredited agents. Ethiopian’s NDC documentation separates direct connections, which it says suit large agencies and OTAs with IT resources, from aggregator routes, and says commission, service charge and currency are agreed with the local Ethiopian office.
Accreditation is a cost many small agents say they are trying to shed. Rachael Penaluna, managing director of Sure Maritime Travel, told Travel News in September 2025 that the IATA guarantee is one of the biggest deterrents to the BSP because it is expensive and can rise, and that larger agencies with an IATA history find it easier to move to IATA’s EasyPay wallet. Thomalex’s Monique Diez said the onus is on airlines to have payment infrastructure ready before they connect to aggregators. The same article reported a Travel News poll in which a third of agents felt airlines were not receptive to direct transaction channels.
Ethiopian’s release does allow cash or credit card, which is more flexible than a BSP-only route, and AirGateway CEO Jorge Díaz says partners can sell Ethiopian in their existing workflows and “improve their margins doing it.” That is a claim, not a measurement. Nothing published says whether an unaccredited African agency can connect directly, or must go through a consolidator, and at what cost.
What agents and OTAs say when asked
The public voices describe technology arriving faster than the workflow around it. At Web in Travel in Cape Town, Wakanow Group CEO Bayo Adedeji complained that airlines treat OTAs differently from offline sellers: “They give us deals, but then tell us we can’t display them online.” Hedley said on the same panel that low card penetration and the variety of local payment methods hold back OTA growth. FCM’s Bonnie Smith told Travel News in September 2024 that corporate buyers working across Africa face inconsistent NDC content from market to market and possible changes to negotiated rates. ASATA chief executive Otto de Vries said NDC and distribution platforms were the top concern among Travel News readers for 2024, at 30 per cent, and had created significant operational challenges for members.
The firms best placed to act are acting. Wakanow says it became the first African travel company to offer Lufthansa Group NDC content through a direct API in September, after direct links to British Airways and Emirates in February 2025. That matches Ethiopian’s own documentation, and it implies a two-tier market: large OTAs and TMCs connect directly, and everyone else depends on an aggregator, a consolidator or a GDS to do it for them.
What the airlines and AFRAA say
Airlink says adoption is rising. Chief commercial officer Katherine Whelan told Travel News in January that a study the airline had just finished found most agents still on the GDS, with a growing number moving to NDC or running hybrid models. No figures were published. When Airlink began NDC in 2024, Travel News reported that GDS bookings would carry a distribution fee of between 6 and 11 US dollars depending on point of sale, while agents moving to NDC would get preferential terms on selected booking classes until July 2026. That window has closed, and TDN could not find what replaced it.
Ethiopian’s distribution director Meaza Taye framed the AirGateway deal around AirGateway’s connections to agencies and booking platforms worldwide. The release names no African market. Nor is this Ethiopian’s first aggregator link: Kenyan consolidator AfroAtlas announced a deal to carry its NDC content in September 2022. Four years on, TDN could not find a published figure for how many African agencies book Ethiopian through NDC.
AFRAA Secretary General Abderahmane Berthé named the missing piece in TDN’s June interview. He said technology vendors consistently underestimate how embedded agents remain in GDS workflows, and that any strategy without agent training and transition support is “building on an incomplete foundation.” He added that airlines carry real transition risk while most of their revenue flows through agents who cannot yet sell NDC, and that infrastructure built for African travel has to reach smaller agencies in thin GDS markets and reflect mobile payments and low card use.
The public evidence is thinner than the announcements
Most of the agent-side evidence above comes from one market. The surveys, polls and association statements TDN found are largely South African, and several are more than a year old. TDN found no public statement from an agent association in Nigeria, Kenya, Rwanda or Ethiopia on the Ethiopian or Airlink connections. The Nigerian association NANTA’s public positions have centred on cross-border ticket sales and a gap between fares published online and on the GDS, not on NDC access.
The airline-side data has gaps of its own. The AFRAA and TPConnects survey found that more than 40 per cent of surveyed airlines are planning or implementing NDC, but neither organisation has published the sample size, a gap TDN flagged in its Berthé interview. Treat any African NDC statistic, including those in this piece, as indicative until the underlying samples are public.
The numbers that would settle it
Airlines and aggregators hold the figures that would answer the question. How many agencies in each African market have activated Ethiopian or Airlink content? How many book it regularly, and what share of their eligible sales does it represent? What does it take to qualify in accreditation, volume and fees, and what does an agent without a licence pay a consolidator to get there? Can a booking be changed or refunded without leaving the platform, and how often does it still need a person?
None of this is hard to measure. A platform that can report a booking can report who made it. Until those figures are public, every new connection announced for an African airline tells us what the airline has built. It does not tell us whether an agency in Kigali, Nairobi or Lagos can sell it, and that is the fact that decides whether NDC lowers distribution costs or only moves them onto the agent.
