Chief Commercial Officer Nowel Ngala told TDN the GDS is “absolutely critical” to Air Peace’s growth beyond Nigeria. The published record shows how many routes to the agent the airline has assembled. It says less about what travels over them.
When TDN interviewed Air Peace Chief Commercial Officer Nowel Ngala in May, he was clear about where the GDS sits in the airline’s plans. Asked whether GDS partnerships still matter, he said: “They are absolutely critical.” The goal, he said, is “balanced distribution optimisation rather than channel conflict,” with direct sales, GDS partnerships and NDC coexisting.
Since 2019, the public record has shown Air Peace building out its distribution one step at a time: an interline through Hahn Air, a new reservation system, appearances by Amadeus and Sabre at an agent forum, an expanded Travelport partnership and an interline with Emirates. They are not the same kind of step. Two are interlines, one is a content agreement, one is technology infrastructure and one is a report of what GDS executives said. Taken together, they show an airline that has invested steadily in being easy to find. The public record is clearer on reach than on what an agent can sell once the airline appears in the system. The May interview did not reach that question.
What Ngala told TDN
His case rested on visibility. International and multi-sector travel in Africa, he said, still runs through the agency ecosystem, and “without strong GDS partnerships, an airline’s visibility in those markets becomes significantly limited.” He tied that to Air Peace’s ambitions beyond Nigeria: the UK, the Caribbean, and what he described as sixth freedom connectivity, routing passengers through Nigerian hubs to destinations they cannot reach on a single carrier.
On NDC, he said it adds value through personalised offers and dynamic packaging, but alongside existing channels and not instead of them. On agencies, the interview’s headline quote was his: “The future is not about disintermediation. It is about smarter collaboration supported by better technology and stronger commercial alignment.”
All of it is about reach and relationships. The interview set out the strategy. The detail of what Air Peace sells through each channel was outside its scope.
Five steps, five different things
The table sets out what the sources say, in date order. Hitit is infrastructure, not a route to the agent. It is included because the reservation system sits behind every channel.
| Date | Channel | What the source says |
|---|---|---|
| 16 October 2019 | Hahn Air interline | Air Peace signed an interline with Hahn Air “to enhance its indirect distribution strategy with sales via Amadeus.” Agents could book Air Peace and ticket it on Hahn Air’s HR-169 document through their normal GDS process. Air Peace then flew 18 destinations in seven countries with 14 aircraft. |
| 23 March 2023 | Hitit Crane PSS | Hitit announced Air Peace’s integration with its Crane reservation, booking engine, mobile app and loyalty systems, and that it had begun using Crane DCS. Air Peace then flew 20 domestic, seven regional and three international destinations. |
| 22 September 2025 | Amadeus and Sabre | BusinessDay reported that executives from both attended Air Peace’s travel partner forum in Abuja and said its integration into their systems, covering over 160 countries and 55,000 agencies, would support the Abuja-London route. |
| 26 January 2026 | Emirates interline | Emirates and Air Peace activated an expanded bilateral interline. Tickets can be booked on emirates.com, flyairpeace.com or through travel agents. It adds Banjul and Dakar via Abidjan, and Freetown and Monrovia via Accra, to the 13 Nigerian cities Emirates passengers already reached through Air Peace. |
| 27 January 2026 | Travelport | Travelport announced a multi-year content agreement making Air Peace’s “full content” available on Travelport+ to hundreds of thousands of agencies, with “advanced retailing, rich content, and branding capabilities.” |
Three details are worth noting. First, Travelport’s Global Head of Travel Partners Damian Hickey said the company was “delighted to expand our partnership with Air Peace,” so the relationship pre-dated the January agreement. Second, the Emirates and Travelport announcements came a day apart. The sources do not link them. Third, several outlets report the Travelport deal as announced on 1 March 2026. Travelport’s own release is dated 27 January 2026.
For Amadeus and Sabre, TDN found no content agreement announced by either GDS. The September 2025 account rests on BusinessDay’s report of what their executives said at the forum.
What is not yet public
Travelport’s release speaks of retailing, rich content and branding. It does not mention NDC. Nothing else reviewed for this piece says whether Air Peace is NDC certified or has NDC content live in any channel. That is an absence in what is published, not proof that it does not exist.
Also not yet public are the commercial terms of these arrangements, the share of Air Peace’s sales that comes through each channel, whether branded fares and ancillaries are available to agents in each one, and how servicing, refunds and exchanges work for a booking made through a GDS. The Hitit announcement is more than three years old, and nothing later confirms what Air Peace’s reservation system looks like today.
This matters for Ngala’s central claim. “Balanced distribution” describes a mix. A mix cannot be assessed from announcements of availability. The announcements establish that Air Peace is on the screen. They do not yet show how the screen compares with what the airline sells directly.
Visibility is one half
Ngala framed the GDS as a visibility problem, and on that point the record supports him. By early 2026, Air Peace had visibility in at least one GDS by contract, and in two more according to executives who attended its forum.
Visibility only gets a carrier onto the agent’s screen. What follows, such as seat selection, bags, branded fares and what an agent can do after a sale, depends on the content each channel carries. The Travelport release promises rich content and branding. Whether those features are live for Air Peace is not stated. That is TDN’s reading of what the sources leave open, and not a finding about Air Peace’s product.
Connections are doing the work
The two interlines are the clearest published evidence of how Air Peace plans to sell connections. Hahn Air’s 2019 arrangement let agents in selected markets ticket Air Peace on Hahn Air’s HR-169 document through their usual GDS process. Emirates’ 2026 agreement links Air Peace’s West and Central African network to Dubai and London and is sold through agents.
That bears on the sixth freedom thesis. Air Peace launched its Lagos to Barbados service, via Antigua, on 24 May 2026, three days after the interview was published. Sources differ on how often it flies: Air Peace’s route page describes monthly flights, launch coverage reported twice-monthly flights on the last two Mondays of each month, and Barbados Today described a schedule running from May to September. The route page still advertises the service and says fares are live, but TDN could not confirm operating dates after September. The service is still young, and whatever its frequency, agents have a limited number of connecting options around it. The fuller picture for Ngala’s thesis is likely to come from routes through Lagos where the Emirates interline already operates, and from how well those connections can be sold through the GDS. The Caribbean service is one to follow as it matures.
The cost question
One question the interview did not cover concerns cost. AFRAA Secretary General Abderahmane Berthé told TDN in June that GDS charges on a short sector such as Nairobi to Mombasa are similar to those on Nairobi to London. That is a different argument from Ngala’s, which concerns international reach, and the two do not conflict. But Air Peace flies the largest domestic network in Nigeria, per TDN’s interview, and nothing published yet says what share of its domestic sales runs through the GDS or what that costs against fares.
What to watch
The open questions concern content, not reach. Does Air Peace’s Travelport content include NDC, or is it traditional? Do Amadeus or Sabre publish their own announcements about Air Peace? Does the Caribbean service become a regular part of the schedule? Does any agency body comment on how Air Peace content performs in the GDS?
Until those answers are published, the record supports a modest conclusion. Air Peace has built a wide set of routes to the agent in a short time. The public record does not yet show how much of its sales travel on them.
