The Chief Commercial Officer of Air Peace on the Travelport partnership, why distribution strength is inseparable from international growth, and what the airline is building toward beyond Nigeria.
For most of its history, Air Peace has been understood primarily as a Nigerian carrier. The largest domestic network in the country, a dominant presence across West African routes, a brand built on scale and accessibility within one of Africa’s most competitive aviation markets.
That framing is now too small.
Nowel Ngala, Chief Commercial Officer of Air Peace, is building a commercial architecture designed for something more ambitious: a pan-African and intercontinental network airline that connects Africa more efficiently to the world, on African terms. The multi-year content agreement signed with Travelport is one signal of that shift. The Caribbean expansion strategy is another. The sixth freedom connectivity ambitions running through both are the thread that connects them.
His view of where distribution fits into that ambition is precise, pragmatic, and worth examining closely.
The Travelport Agreement in Context
The timing of Air Peace’s content agreement with Travelport is not incidental. It reflects a specific moment in the airline’s trajectory.
“Air Peace is currently at a very important phase of its growth and international expansion,” Ngala says. “As we continue to expand beyond Nigeria into regional, intercontinental, and emerging transatlantic markets, strengthening our global distribution footprint has become a strategic necessity rather than an option.”
That distinction, necessity rather than option, carries weight. Many African carriers approach GDS relationships as a cost to be managed. Ngala frames the Travelport partnership as infrastructure for growth, a mechanism for ensuring that Air Peace content is visible and bookable within the ecosystems where international travel buyers already operate.
The practical stakes are clear. As Air Peace extends into the UK, the Caribbean, and transatlantic corridors with cultural and business ties to West Africa, the airline is entering markets where agency ecosystems, corporate travel programmes, and GDS-connected consolidators are the primary booking channels. Without meaningful presence in those channels, Air Peace routes exist commercially only for the passengers who already know to look for them.
The agreement changes that equation. It positions Air Peace as a visible, bookable option for travel agents and corporate buyers who may not have been aware of its international ambitions, and who will now encounter it within the same workflow where they book every other international carrier.
Why GDS Still Matters
The airline industry has spent considerable energy in recent years debating whether GDS partnerships remain relevant in an era of direct distribution and NDC. For Air Peace, Ngala’s answer is unambiguous.
“They are absolutely critical.”
The reasoning is specific to where Air Peace is operating and where it wants to go. International aviation, particularly across Africa, Europe, and complex multi-sector markets, remains heavily relationship-driven through the agency ecosystem. Passengers booking long-haul or connecting journeys in these markets frequently do not interact with airline websites directly. They rely on travel management companies, consolidators, OTAs, and retail travel agents.
“Without strong GDS partnerships, an airline’s visibility in those markets becomes significantly limited,” Ngala says.
There is also a strategic dimension that goes beyond simple visibility. Air Peace is not only building outbound traffic from Nigeria. It is equally focused on capturing inbound traffic into Nigeria and West Africa, and on developing sixth freedom connectivity across its network, routing international passengers through Nigerian hubs to destinations they cannot reach directly on a single carrier.
That sixth freedom ambition requires a distribution presence that reaches travel buyers who are not looking for a Nigerian carrier specifically, but who are looking for the most efficient routing between, say, the Caribbean and East Africa. GDS visibility is a prerequisite for competing in that space.
The NDC Balance
Air Peace’s position on modern retailing is notably balanced, particularly for a carrier expanding aggressively into international markets where the pressure to push NDC adoption is growing.
Ngala rejects the framing that positions direct distribution and indirect channels as competitors. His view is that the future is an ecosystem where direct sales, GDS partnerships, and NDC capabilities coexist and serve different commercial purposes.
“Our focus is on balanced distribution optimisation rather than channel conflict,” he says.
The logic behind that position is grounded in the realities of the African market. Agency penetration across the continent remains extremely strong. Complex international itineraries, in particular, are still predominantly agency-driven. An aggressive push to migrate bookings away from that channel would sacrifice commercial relationships that Air Peace needs for its international growth.
NDC, in Ngala’s view, adds value by enabling personalised offers, dynamic packaging, and customer experiences that the traditional fare model cannot support. But it adds that value alongside existing channels, not instead of them. For Air Peace, modernising retailing capability is not the same thing as dismantling the distribution relationships that have supported its growth.
What International Expansion Actually Teaches
The lessons Air Peace has accumulated through its international expansion are the most operationally valuable part of this conversation, because they reflect real experience rather than strategy documents.
The central one is that launching a route is the easy part. Sustainable international performance requires distribution strength, local market presence, regulatory alignment, and brand awareness that take time to build and cannot be replicated through seat capacity alone.
“Every market behaves differently,” Ngala says. “Consumer behavior, pricing sensitivity, booking patterns, agency influence, visa realities, and competitive dynamics vary significantly from one region to another.”
That observation sounds obvious. Its practical implications are not. Many African carriers have launched international routes with strong aircraft and weak commercial infrastructure, and discovered that operational capacity does not translate automatically into commercial performance. Air Peace’s willingness to invest in GDS partnerships, local market relationships, and data-driven decision-making reflects an understanding that the commercial layer of international aviation is as capital-intensive as the operational one.
The data dimension is increasingly central. Revenue management, market intelligence, and demand forecasting are no longer optional for a carrier competing on intercontinental routes. The airlines that operate with analytical rigour in those markets will make better network decisions, price more competitively, and build more sustainable route economics than those relying primarily on intuition.
Agencies as Strategic Partners
On the future of airline-agency relationships in Africa, Ngala’s position is the opposite of the disintermediation narrative that has dominated parts of the global aviation conversation.
“We view travel agencies as long-term strategic partners.”
The basis for that view is structural. Africa remains a relationship-driven market. Agencies provide customer acquisition, corporate penetration, market education, payment solutions, and local trust that airlines cannot easily replicate through direct channels alone. In many markets across the continent, the agency is not merely a booking intermediary. It is the customer’s primary interface with the travel industry.
For Air Peace, the strategic response to that reality is not to compete with agencies for the customer relationship, but to modernise and strengthen the collaboration. Better tools, more transparent commercial policies, faster support, and more genuine market development partnership.
“The future is not about disintermediation,” Ngala says. “It is about smarter collaboration supported by better technology and stronger commercial alignment.”
That framing has implications beyond Air Peace. It reflects a broader truth about how distribution in African aviation actually works, and why the playbook that carriers in other markets have used to reduce agency dependency cannot simply be transplanted onto the continent.
The Growth Horizon
Ngala’s assessment of Air Peace’s opportunity over the next few years is both ambitious and grounded.
Regional African connectivity remains the most structurally important opportunity. Africa is one of the least connected regions globally relative to its traffic potential. Direct routes between West, Central, East, and Southern Africa that currently require transiting outside the continent represent a significant market that no African carrier has fully captured.
Long-haul underserved markets are the second major opportunity. The dependence of African passengers on non-African hubs for connectivity, routing through European or Middle Eastern airports for journeys that could in principle be operated directly, represents both a commercial opportunity and a strategic ambition. Air Peace is building toward contributing to a change in that pattern.
The Caribbean and Brazil represent a third dimension, one that is specific to Air Peace’s positioning and to the historical, cultural, and business links between West Africa and the Americas. These are not generic growth opportunities. They are routes that serve real demand from real communities, and where Air Peace’s identity as a West African carrier is a commercial asset rather than a constraint.
“The long-term opportunity for Air Peace lies in evolving from being primarily a Nigerian carrier into becoming a stronger pan-African and intercontinental network airline connecting Africa more efficiently to the world,” Ngala says.
That evolution is already underway. The Travelport agreement, the international route expansion, the sixth freedom ambitions, the commercial infrastructure being built around all of it — these are not separate initiatives. They are expressions of a single strategic thesis about what Air Peace is becoming and what African aviation can be when it is built with genuine continental ambition.
The distribution decisions being made now will determine whether that ambition translates into commercial reality.
Nowel Ngala is Chief Commercial Officer of Air Peace Limited. Air Peace is Nigeria’s largest airline, operating an extensive domestic, regional, and international network.
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