If you walk into most travel agencies in Kampala today, you will find the same scene. A desk covered in printed itineraries. A phone ringing with a customer asking for a fare quote. A WhatsApp chat with 200 unread messages from clients, suppliers, and airline contacts. And somewhere in the corner, a laptop with a spreadsheet that is supposed to be tracking all of it.
This is the reality of the East African travel industry in 2025. It is an industry that moves billions of shillings every year, serves thousands of customers across borders, and operates almost entirely on manual processes that break every single day.
The Daily Pain
I spent months talking to travel agents in Kampala before I wrote a single line of code. The same problems came up in every conversation.
Double bookings. An agent confirms a seat for a customer on a Badr Airlines flight to Khartoum, only to find out later that the same seat was already booked through another channel. The customer is furious. The agent scrambles. Sometimes it costs real money to fix.
Lost customer data. A returning client calls asking about a trip they booked six months ago. The agent checks three different WhatsApp chats and two notebooks before giving up and asking the customer to repeat everything from scratch.
No price transparency. A customer asks for the best fare from Kampala to Dubai. The agent opens three browser tabs, calls two consolidators, and waits 20 minutes to give a quote that may already be outdated. Meanwhile the customer is getting quotes from three other agencies doing the exact same manual dance.
Slow response times. A customer sends a WhatsApp message at 9 AM asking about available flights. The agent is on a call with another client. By the time they respond at 11 AM, the customer has already booked with someone faster.
The Global Systems Exist — But Not for Everyone
Here is what makes this frustrating. The technology to solve these problems already exists. Travelport, Amadeus, Sabre — these are powerful global distribution systems that handle flight search, booking, and ticketing for agencies worldwide. They work. They are reliable. They are also built for agencies processing hundreds of bookings a day with dedicated IT teams and budgets to match.
A mid-size travel agency in Kampala doing 20 to 50 bookings a month cannot justify the cost. The licensing fees, the training requirements, the technical infrastructure — it is designed for a different scale entirely. So these agencies stay stuck between systems they cannot afford and manual processes that do not scale.
Why This Matters
Travel is one of the biggest economic drivers in East Africa. Agencies are the backbone of how people book flights across the region and beyond — to Khartoum, Juba, Nairobi, Dubai, Istanbul. These are not small transactions. A single family booking flights for an emergency trip home can spend millions of shillings.
And yet the infrastructure serving these transactions is notebooks and WhatsApp groups.
This is the most obviously broken system I had ever seen in an industry that mattered to real people.
This is why we started building Novic Flights.
In the next post, I will share what happened when we moved from thinking about this problem to actually building something. It did not go the way we expected.
