MoMo flight booking targets one of the last transactions Ugandans still need a card for

KAMPALA — MTN Mobile Money has launched a flight booking platform that lets Ugandans search, compare and pay for international air tickets from their phones, targeting one of the few everyday transactions in the country that has continued to require a credit card.

Travel by MoMo, launched at the Sheraton Hotel in Kampala on Tuesday in partnership with local travel management company Next Travel, displays fares in Uganda shillings and settles payment through the MoMo wallet. The booking engine runs on technology from Amadeus, the Spanish travel technology group whose systems serve airlines and travel companies in more than 190 countries.

The commercial logic rests on a mismatch that has defined Ugandan digital commerce for a decade. Mobile money is close to universal; cards are not. There were 34.6 million active mobile money subscribers as of June 2025 against roughly 24 million bank accounts, and card payments account for a small share of online transactions. Airline websites, however, are built for Visa and Mastercard.

The practical result has been that Ugandans who can afford to fly have often been unable to buy the ticket themselves.

“We recognised that many people still face challenges when booking flights, from navigating multiple websites to accessing suitable payment options,” said Phrase Lubega, managing director of MTN MoMo Uganda.

Jemima Kariuki, the company’s chief product officer, said the platform was designed around financial exclusion. “By enabling flight bookings through MoMo, we are making travel more accessible to more Ugandans, including those who may not have access to credit cards but are active users of mobile money,” she said.

The agent economy

The clearest immediate beneficiaries may be traders. Issa Ssekito, chairman of the Kampala Capital City Traders Association, said the overwhelming majority of traders sourcing goods from China route their ticket purchases through travel agents because the process is otherwise too complex, paying upwards of $50 per booking in fees on top of the fare.

That figure points to the size of the intermediation market the platform enters — and to an oddity in its structure. Travel by MoMo is pitched as removing the need for a middleman, but it is operated by Next Travel, itself a travel management company. Neither partner has disclosed what Travel by MoMo will charge in booking or service fees, which will determine whether traders save the sums Ssekito describes or simply change which intermediary collects them.

MTN also did not say how revenue is shared between the partners, or whether fares shown will be comparable with those on airline websites.

A crowded direction of travel

The launch runs alongside a broader push by carriers to pull bookings away from agents. Uganda Airlines built its own mobile app in 2023 for that purpose, after finding that agent-routed bookings cut the airline off from basic customer data. At the time roughly 60% of its reservations came through agents, a balance the carrier said it expected to shift.

For MTN, the platform continues a strategy of extending MoMo beyond payments into consumer services. The unit reported 14.2 million users for the period ended 30 September 2025, and remains the dominant mobile money provider in a market it contests mainly with Airtel Money.

Whether flight booking becomes a meaningful line of business or a marketing exercise will depend on volume in a country where air travel remains the preserve of a small minority. Formal financial inclusion in Uganda stood at 68% at the last FinScope survey, with mobile money usage at 64% and mobile phone ownership at 72% — figures that describe a large addressable base, but not one that flies often.

Customers can access the service through the MTN MoMo app.