A No-Nonsense Pathway to Distribution Freedom — an Africa Focus

I’ve been lucky enough to work in the airline industry in Africa, so I’ve seen first-hand the huge opportunities there, but also the unique challenges it faces. It is a region I care about and one I want to see win – demand is there, the growth is there, the ambition is there. As most airline CCOs will tell you better than me, the one thing that is too often missing is margin.

So when I look at where distribution is heading, I find myself thinking about African carriers first — not because they are behind, but because they have the most to gain and, but the most to lose from inaction.

Airlines in Africa know that changing legacy distribution is necessary, they know NDC is no longer a pioneering technology, they’ve seen airlines in rest of the world (and some of their local competitors) adopt it, it’s just they may not know where to start. They believe that the barriers to entry for NDC are high, they worry it’s resource intensive, they’re not sure where to get started, what’s needed to get it up and running, and what the hidden challenges will be and how to overcome them on the fly. When something looks that big and that complex, the safest-feeling option is to wait.

I understand that completely. Depending on who the airline chooses to partner with, those things can be true. But not all potential partners are equal – some have an aligned business model and want you to succeed, and some have a contradictory business model where your success means loss for them. Some create complexity as they make money from the status quo. That’s not obvious from the outset. Every month an airline stands still, the problem feels larger and the gap to the carriers who moved gets wider. Inaction is no longer neutral in Africa, it means falling further behind. There’s a reason that legacy distribution players try to lock African airlines into long term agreements – and it isn’t because they want airlines there to have flexibility and control.

A challenging market has just got harder

The problem is compounding as the financial picture has just become tougher. In December 2025, IATA forecast African airlines would make $1.30 profit per passenger in 2026 — already the lowest of any region, against a global average of $7.90 and $28.60 in the Middle East. Six months later, in June 2026, IATA cut that forecast to 40 cents per passenger. The region’s net margin fell from 1.0% to 0.2%, and total regional profit roughly halved, from around $200 million to around $100 million.

Forty cents a passenger. Ask an African airline CFO how much it costs them to sell an airline ticket, and it can easily be 30x that (conservatively). Ask that same CFO what proportion of total cost base is distribution related, it’s probably well into the double digits, just behind fuel and labour. Usually cutting costs requires a trade-off. Lower quality. Less flexibility. More headache. There is one obvious way to cut costs while simultaneously modernizing your airline and setting the foundations for future success. Sounds too good to be true? Well, that depends on your choice of partner.

The costs you cannot change, and the one you can

It helps to separate the costs an airline can do something about from the ones it cannot. African carriers run the highest unit costs in the world — roughly 140 US cents per available tonne-kilometre, about double the rest of the industry, with non-fuel unit costs running 112% higher. Much of that an airline simply cannot move: fuel priced around 17% above the global average, taxes and charges 12 to 15% higher, navigation charges, maintenance, insurance, capital. You cannot negotiate your way out of the price of jet fuel.

Distribution is the exception. It is one of the few large cost lines where the airline can drive positive change – it’s successfully proven across the world. And the great news for airlines in Africa is that the technology, infrastructure and roadmap is already in place in the region.

Traditional distribution charges are largely fixed per segment, and a fixed fee is brutal on a low fare. AFRAA’s Secretary General, Abdérahmane Berthé, put it well: the GDS charge on a Nairobi to Mombasa booking can look much like the charge on Nairobi to London, even though the short-haul fare is a fraction of the long-haul one. On a cheap regional ticket, that same fee eats a far bigger slice of the fare, and of whatever thin margin was there to begin with. Little wonder that in AFRAA’s 2025 distribution research, every participating airline named reducing distribution cost as a priority.

For any CFO or CCO looking at 2027, this is the ripe target. It is controllable, it is measurable, and improving it does not mean taking anything away from the customer. But where to start?

Why the choice of partner determines success or failure

Which brings me to the part that actually determines whether this works: who you do it with.

Plenty of providers will sell an airline an NDC connection and then leave it to build everything around that pipe — onboard the partners, negotiate the agreements, run the testing, support the sellers, chase the adoption. For a large carrier with a deep distribution team that’s plausible. For a mid-sized African airline with a small team, that is exactly the mountain that seems to big to climb.

We built FLX Select for precisely that airline. It is not an NDC pipe. It is the whole end to end solution to get an airline up and running and delivering ROI via NDC — technology, offer creation, servicing, payments, seller connectivity, onboarding and commercial guidance — because an API on its own won’t deliver a successful strategy. Adoption does, and partnering with Accelya is the key to driving adoption.

A practical example for a hesitant African airline: Accelya already connects to a large and growing number of aggregators and travel sellers who know how to sell NDC content in Africa and beyond. When a new airline joins, it does not have to shoulder that painful, resource-heavy integration and certification work itself — we do the heavy lifting. That leaves the airline free to focus on where the value is: the commercial relationships and the channel strategy. We take a partnership approach to help shape that strategy, and we act as the airline’s advocate in the market. We walk through it step by step rather than handing over a toolkit and wishing you luck.

We can talk like this because we have done it. We drive more NDC volume than everyone else in the industry put together — over half of all NDC transactions worldwide run through Accelya — and we have launched successful NDC programmes in Africa with mid-sized carriers running small distribution teams. Our credibility is proven. TMC adoption is rapidly expanding, up 169% over the last 12 months, and some airlines are achieving ancillary attachments (pure margin) of 30%, or $12 incremental per ticket. How powerful would it be for an African carrier to get from $0.40 to $12.40 margin per ticket? And additionally how powerful would this be if cost savings were layer on top of that?

Having the best of both worlds

African airlines have distributed successfully through the GDSs for decades, and those channels offer real reach and reliability. The trouble is that they’re disproportionately expensive in Africa. We aren’t advocating switching everything to NDC overnight. We are suggesting that the path to NDC is easier than you think, and this puts the airline in a great position to choose the distribution strategy that’s right for them, and to negotiate better outcomes. We fully understand that the legacy providers don’t make that easy, that’s because they have a financial incentive to make it harder than it needs to be. A suggestion would be to have a conversation with your current IT providers about putting specific and tangible contractual commitments drive NDC adoption over EDIFACT through the lowest cost channels. You’ll quickly see enthusiasm dry up.

Run NDC and EDIFACT side by side. Make richer content available through NDC, and apply a sensible EDIFACT surcharge where it makes sense. The feedback from the market is that African demand is remarkably resilient to these surcharges — where carriers have introduced them by market, they have largely been absorbed with little impact on share. Airlines can then follow the trend, watch what works, and adapt accordingly.

But none of that flexibility is available until the airline takes the first step. The whole game is getting a foot on the first rung of the ladder — a live, working NDC programme. Once that foundation is in place, the freedom and the options open up. Before it, they do not exist.

There is one thing to keep front of mind, and one that’s been a difficult trap for airlines to get out of, regardless of region. Restrictive, long-dated agreements with incumbent providers — the same players whose economics have not exactly been kind to African carriers — can quietly lock in the very model you are trying to escape, hidden away in long complex content commitment contracts.

A practical first pass

None of this needs to begin with a multi-year transformation. A practical first pass looks like this:

1. Understand your economics — what you pay by channel, where contracts restrict you, and which markets hold the clearest opportunity. Have an honest conversation with your current IT vendors – are they 100% committed to helping you save distribution cost? Are they willing to contractually commit to it?
2. Decide what you are optimising for — lower cost, richer content, stronger ancillaries, more control, or a mix.
3. Understand your current agreements — understand your contracts that are preventing you from achieving flexibility and control? Are you confident that these agreements are in your best interest?
4. Choose a partner that takes away the complexity — technology, onboarding, testing, servicing and seller support as one programme, not six problems left on your desk.
5. Build adoption deliberately — the right aggregators, agreements, content and incentives.
6. Expand on evidence — measure cost, adoption and revenue, then extend.

That is the no-nonsense pathway: understand the economics, take out the complexity, start where the case is clearest, and build from proof.

You do not need all the answers to start

Here is what I would most like African airlines to hear. You do not need a big internal NDC team. You do not need to replace your PSS. You do not need to turn off the GDS. And you do not need to walk in with a finished distribution strategy. You need a commercial reason to act, a senior stakeholder to buy-in (I’m willing to bet your CFO will jump at this), and a partner willing to guide the programme step by step.

Accelya is here, we want to help, and we have already done the hard part with airlines in Africa. The distribution model that has weighed on the region’s carriers for decades is, finally, something they can change — and the tools, the partners and the proof now exist to change it.

At 40 cents profit per passenger, changing your distribution economics may very well be the difference between success or failure for your airline in these turbulent times.

The first step is not complicated. It is a conversation — about where your airline is today, what is holding it back, and what distribution freedom could actually look like for you. That is the conversation I would love to have.

Sources

[1] IATA, Airline Profitability Stabilizes with 3.9% Net Margin Expected in 2026, 9 December 2025. https://www.iata.org/en/pressroom/2025-releases/2025-12-09-01/
[2] IATA, Middle East Disruptions and High Fuel Prices Halve Airline Industry Profitability, 7 June 2026. https://www.iata.org/en/pressroom/2026-releases/06-07-middle-east-disruptions-high-fuel-prices-halve-airline-industry-profitability/
[3] IATA, Cost Disadvantage of African Airlines, 31 July 2025. https://www.iata.org/en/iata-repository/publications/economic-reports/cost-disadvantage-of-african-airlines/
[4] IATA, Africa: Growth Strengthens but Structural Challenges Keep Airline Profitability Marginal, 11 December 2025. https://www.iata.org/en/about/worldwide/ame/blog/africa-growth-strengthens-but-structural-challenges-keep-airline-profitability-marginal/
[5] AFRAA and TPConnects, Airline Revenue Maximization: Modern Retailing Strategies from NDC to OOSD, 13 May 2025. https://www.afraa.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/masterclass-1-Airline-Revenue-Maximization-Modern-Retailing-Strategies-from-NDC-to-OOSD.pdf
[6] AFRAA, Abderahmane Berthe: The NDC Standard Does Not Adequately Serve the Majority of African Airlines, 23 June 2026. https://www.afraa.org/afraas-abderahmane-berthe-the-ndc-standard-does-not-adequately-serve-the-majority-of-african-airlines/
[7] Accelya, Decoding Modern Retailing: A Practical Guide to Offer, Order, Settle, Deliver, January 2026 (Accelya states it supports roughly half of global NDC transactions). https://w3.accelya.com/news-views/insights/

Practitioner observations on African NDC implementation draw on Richard Cooke’s July 2026 discussion with a consultant working closely with carriers in the region, and are presented as first-hand practitioner insight rather than independently audited benchmarks.