Novic Flights Enters the Testing Phase: Building a Booking Tool for African Agencies

One month ago, I wrote about the booking problem facing East African travel agencies. Manual processes, lost data, slow quotes, no transparency. The response from agents I talked to was consistent: yes, this is broken, and yes, we need something better.

So we built something.

What Novic Flights Does Right Now

Novic Flights is a booking tool designed specifically for small and mid-size travel agencies in East Africa. At this stage, it handles three core functions.

Fare search. An agent types in a route — Kampala to Khartoum, Entebbe to Dubai — and Novic Flights pulls available fares from the carriers that actually serve these routes. No more opening five browser tabs and calling consolidators.

Basic booking flow. Once the agent finds a fare, they can start a booking directly in the system. Customer details, passport information, payment status — all in one place instead of scattered across WhatsApp messages and notebooks.

Agency dashboard. Every booking is tracked. The agent can see what is pending, what is confirmed, what needs follow-up. No more guessing about where things stand.

What We Are Not

I want to be honest about what Novic Flights is not at this stage. It is not Travelport. It is not Amadeus. It does not connect to every airline in the world or handle complex multi-city itineraries with codeshare agreements.

We built it for a specific market: agencies that handle direct routes on carriers like Badr Airlines, Tarco Aviation, and similar regional operators. The agencies that are currently doing this work entirely by hand.

The philosophy is simple. Build something that works for agencies here, at their scale, within their budget. Make it better every week based on what they tell us.

What Happens Next

We are about to put Novic Flights in front of real travel agencies. Not a demo, not a pitch — actual agents using it for actual bookings with actual customers. That is where we will learn whether what we built matches what the market needs.

I will be writing about what happens. The good, the bad, and whatever surprises come up.