Despite slow growth in NDC adoption among travel agents, technology providers say they are noticing gradual growth in response to improved servicing capabilities.
According to the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), an international market research and technology service provider for agents and airlines, leisure travel agencies accounted for 16% of settled NDC transactions in 2025 while corporate agencies accounted for 7%. The remaining 77% were transacted by OTAs, which have long been the primary users of NDC.
While international adoption of NDC among agents remains low, ARC noted that this still represented an increase on NDC transactions completed by agents in 2024, as leisure agencies accounted for 11% of NDC transactions and TMCs accounted for 4%.
ARC found that traditional travel agencies, especially corporate agencies, were still hesitant to adopt NDC, in part due to the cost and complexity of developing compliant technology, but also due to limited post-sale servicing capabilities.
This hesitancy was reflected by South African agents responding to a Travel News poll, where only 35% of South African agents said their NDC adoption had grown over the past year.
Caroline Smallwood, GM of Amadeus Southern Africa, told Travel News that despite agents’ limited adoption growth, Amadeus Southern Africa had still seen continued year-on-year growth in NDC transactions from South African agencies in 2025.
She added that the momentum was particularly strong among several larger agencies that had the resources to scale their NDC programmes over the past year.
She attributed this growth in adoption to the broader airline availability on the Amadeus Travel Platform and, essentially, to the work it had done to enhance its servicing capabilities required to assist clients with more complex bookings.
“Agents tell us that having consistent servicing and unified display across content types makes a significant difference. Additionally, our hands-on enablement efforts, including dedicated workshops and training sessions provided locally throughout 2025, have also helped strengthen adoption and confidence,” said Smallwood.
