The State of NDC Adoption in South Asia & Africa: Progress, Barriers, and What Airlines Should Do Now

Every major airline technology transformation I have observed over twenty-five years has followed the same arc. A new capability generates genuine excitement. Vendors build ambitious narratives. Airlines create roadmaps. And then reality arrives — in the form of legacy infrastructure, constrained budgets, ecosystem dependencies, and organisational inertia that no roadmap adequately accounts for.

NDC has followed this arc more faithfully than most. When IATA intensified its push for NDC adoption in 2021, the industry narrative was relatively straightforward: implement NDC, modernise distribution, reduce GDS dependency, and unlock retailing capabilities that traditional channels cannot support. Five years on, the global picture is one of genuine but uneven progress. And in South Asia and Africa — two regions I have spent significant time working in — the gap between the narrative and the reality is wider than the industry typically acknowledges.

This article is not a critique of NDC. The direction is correct, and the commercial logic is sound. It is an honest assessment of where these regions actually stand, what is really holding them back, and what airlines at different stages of the journey should prioritise in the next twelve months.

The Global Baseline: Progress Is Real, But Depth Is Shallow

Before examining South Asia and Africa specifically, the global context matters — because it sets the benchmark against which regional progress is measured, and it contains a warning that regional airlines should take seriously.

The gap between the first and second statistics is the most important data point in the table. 60% have adopted NDC in some form. Only 27% have meaningfully integrated offer and order capabilities. This means the majority of airlines that claim NDC adoption have built the infrastructure without yet unlocking the commercial transformation it is designed to enable. They have a modern pipe. They are still distributing largely the same product through it.

According to IATA's own 2025 Annual Review, even the leading NDC airlines are still in the setup phase. Most others will not begin their full Offer & Order transition until 2028–2029. The destination everyone is describing will not be mainstream before 2030.

This matters for South Asian and African airlines because the benchmark they are being measured against is itself still far from fully realised. The urgency is real — the gap between early movers and late starters will widen materially over the next three to four years — but the window to act strategically, rather than reactively, has not yet closed.

South Asia: Meaningful Starts, Uneven Execution

South Asia has moved faster than Africa, driven by large domestic demand bases, rapid digital adoption among consumers, and competitive pressure from both LCC and network carriers. India in particular has seen two landmark NDC milestones in the past eighteen months that deserve careful examination — because they illustrate both the progress and the underlying complexity.

The pattern I observe across South Asian carriers broadly maps to three maturity levels — and the distribution of airlines across these levels reveals where the real work remains.

Africa: The Ecosystem Problem That No Vendor Roadmap Solves

Africa's NDC story is different in character from South Asia's — not because the strategic intent is weaker, but because the structural context is fundamentally more complex. The challenge is not individual airline ambition. It is ecosystem readiness.

The agency dependency point deserves more direct treatment than it typically receives in industry discussions. In many African markets, travel agencies account for 60–80% of airline ticket volumes. Pursuing aggressive NDC rollout without a parallel strategy for bringing agencies along does not reduce distribution costs — it creates commercial disruption. Airlines that have seen this play out have learned, often expensively, that distribution transformation is an ecosystem decision, not a unilateral one.

An airline in Nairobi or Lagos cannot adopt NDC in isolation. Its distribution strategy is inextricably linked to the readiness of the agency network it depends on. Moving the airline without moving the ecosystem creates parallel complexity — not transformation.

There is also a structural factor that the global NDC narrative consistently underweights in the African context: the absence of deep specialist capability within airlines themselves. NDC programmes require people who understand both the commercial intent and the technical architecture simultaneously — a profile that is genuinely scarce across the continent. Vendors fill this gap with implementation teams, but vendor-led implementations without deep internal ownership rarely produce the commercial intelligence that NDC is supposed to enable. They produce connectivity. The airline never fully learns how to use it.

The Mistake Both Regions Are Still Making

Having worked across carriers in both regions, I keep encountering the same fundamental misunderstanding — and it is more consequential than any specific technology gap. Airlines in South Asia and Africa are frequently measuring NDC progress against the wrong metrics.

The metrics I see reported most often are: NDC certification achieved; number of connected agencies; API deployment completed; NDC version upgraded to 21.3. These are activity metrics. They measure deployment. They do not measure commercial outcome — which is the only metric that justifies the investment.

An airline can achieve all four of these milestones and still be distributing essentially the same product through a different pipe. That is modernisation of infrastructure. It is not retail transformation. The difference matters because the investment required to move from infrastructure to transformation is significant — and airlines that conflate the two will approve the first budget while being surprised by the requirement for the second.

The airlines in both regions that are creating measurable value from NDC programmes are, without exception, the ones that changed how they think about products before they changed how they distribute them. Instead of asking "how do we distribute fares through NDC?", they started asking "how do we create offers that are worth distributing through NDC?" That reorientation — from distribution modernisation to product thinking — is where the commercial value is generated. The technology follows from the commercial logic, not the other way around.

What a Mature NDC Programme Actually Looks Like

To make the distinction between infrastructure deployment and genuine retail transformation concrete, it is worth examining what a mature, full-scope NDC programme delivers in practice — beyond the go-live milestone that most announcements stop at.

The Air India NDC 21.3 programme, in which Consult VCS served as strategic partner, is instructive because it was deliberately structured across multiple phases — each with a distinct commercial objective, not just a technical milestone. The mandate from the outset was an accelerated delivery timeline: compress what is typically an 18–24 month implementation cycle without compromising scope or integration quality.

These details matter not because Air India's programme is uniquely complex — it is not — but because they illustrate what the scope of a genuine NDC programme looks like when the commercial objectives are set clearly from the start. The airlines in South Asia and Africa that have achieved NDC connectivity but not yet addressed post-booking servicing, disruption handling, or agency access design are, in practical terms, still at the start line. The connectivity is real. The commercial capability is still largely theoretical.

What Airlines Should Do in the Next 12 Months

The prescription differs materially by maturity stage. Generic NDC advice — "adopt NDC 21.3, reduce GDS dependency, build direct channels" — is not useful without knowing where a specific airline actually sits.

The Five-Year Outlook

The question airline leaders in South Asia and Africa were asking five years ago was: "Should we implement NDC?" The question most are asking today is: "How quickly can we scale it?" Over the next five years, the question will shift again — to "how do we become genuine retailers?" And that is a fundamentally different programme from anything most airlines in these regions have yet built a business case for.

The airlines that will lead in South Asia and Africa over the next decade will not necessarily be the ones with the most NDC connections or the highest certification levels on the ARM Index. They will be the ones that used NDC as the starting point for building genuine customer intelligence — understanding what their passengers actually value, constructing offers that reflect that understanding, and using the direct relationship that NDC enables to deepen loyalty and reduce distribution cost simultaneously.

NDC was never the destination. In both regions, the work of getting to the starting line of what NDC makes possible has barely begun.