Airlines process roughly $1 trillion in payments a year and spend about $22 billion doing it, according to a 2024 Edgar, Dunn & Company study cited in IATA’s June 2026 payment services fact sheet. About $18 billion of that is payment fees and $4 billion is airline operating cost, covering systems, compliance and foreign exchange. IATA puts the burden at roughly $4 per passenger, against industry net profit of $7.70 per passenger in 2025. Both are global averages. African airlines earned $1.30 per passenger in 2025, according to IATA figures reported by Aviation Week, but no African payment cost per passenger is published. The two numbers show scale and should not be read as a measured gap.
Numbers like these invite an obvious question. If NDC lets airlines escape the GDS fee, does the cost follow them into payments, and is there an Amadeus, Sabre and Travelport waiting there? The evidence says no, and the reason is structural. A GDS sells one service, multi-airline shopping and booking, to buyers who cannot easily reach the same content elsewhere. Airline payments are a stack of different services that cannot substitute for one another, and each layer has its own concentration.
The card networks are the most concentrated layer. Visa carried 70.38% of the $9.986 trillion that Visa and Mastercard cards issued in the United States spent in 2025, according to the Nilson Report. That is a share of two brands, in one country, on purchase volume. It is not a global figure. Below the networks, acquiring looks fragmented. Nilson counted 30 acquirers in Europe that each processed more than one billion Visa and Mastercard transactions in 2025, and Worldpay and Global Payments only completed their combination in January 2026. Alongside both runs the airline-owned rail. IATA’s Billing and Settlement Plan processed $242.3 billion in 2025, net of $19.7 billion in refunds, and it is operated by the airlines’ own trade body.
Two layers cannot be measured at all. No public source gives acquirers’ share of airline card volume, or the share of agency payments made by virtual card. The most-quoted virtual card estimate, that fewer than 5% of air bookings used them, came from a vendor executive in December 2019. Any claim of a payments triopoly would therefore rest on numbers nobody has published.
Nor does NDC hand the payment relationship to a new gatekeeper. In NDC the airline is the merchant of record, according to Travelport’s developer documentation, and IATA has built BSP access and its EASY PAY prepaid method to work across both GDS and NDC. The control point so far is airline payment policy. Finnair bars cards in an agent’s name without consent, and British Airways stopped accepting cards, lodge cards and eNett virtual cards for private fares in 2018. The shift is also modest in scale. ARC reported that NDC made up 21.2% of ARC-settled transactions in July 2026, against 20.8% in August 2025. That is a share of transactions, not value, and it covers only US agencies.
The GDSs have never been far from payments. Travelport owned eNett until it sold the business to WEX in 2020 for $577.5 million, after announcing a price of $1.7 billion. Sabre now runs Direct Pay with WEX cards, and Amadeus links B2B Wallet to Mastercard’s wholesale program. What no source shows is virtual card providers or networks becoming the gate to NDC content. That remains a hypothesis.
The sharper story sits at the bottom of the stack in Africa and the Middle East. IATA reported $774 million of blocked airline funds in African countries on 31 March 2026, led by Algeria at $258 million. Globally, blocked funds stood at $1.2 billion at the end of October 2025, with Africa and the Middle East accounting for 93% of the total. BSP settled agent sales to airlines on time 99.99% of the time in 2025, but that measures remittance from agents to airlines inside the market. Moving the money out of the country is a separate step, and it depends on a central bank releasing foreign currency.
Better payment routing does help. A Visa study with AFRAA, based on Visa’s 2024 network data, found African airlines approving fewer transactions than airlines elsewhere, with a wider gap in value than in count. Its survey covered 32 airline executives rating their own airlines. A vendor also claims local acquiring saves 59% against cross-border processing, though it has published no method. Local acquiring and account-to-account payments can lift approvals and cut fees. They do not release a blocked dollar.
For the industry, the question of who the fourth GDS will be rests on a false premise. Payments will not produce three companies that every airline and agency must pass through. What they produce is narrower and, for agencies, more demanding: each airline writing its own payment policy by channel and by market, with that policy carrying as much weight in the distribution agreement as the fee schedule. In Africa and the Gulf, the party with the most power over airline payments in the worst-hit markets is neither a card network nor a GDS but the central bank deciding whether sales revenue can leave the country. Airlines there should stop treating payments as a settlement detail and start treating them as one of the places where distribution economics are negotiated.
