The short version
- Hotels carry far better margins than flights because you set the sell price on net rates.
- Bedbanks contract inventory directly; affiliate programmes resell someone else’s. The difference shows in price and in who owns the customer.
- Coverage is regional. No supplier is strongest everywhere — two suppliers is the practical minimum.
- Rate-checks, child ages, cancellation policies and voucher rules cause most production problems.
Flights get the attention, but hotels pay the bills. On a flight you might hold a few percent; on a hotel booking a double-digit margin is normal, because you are buying at a net rate and setting your own retail price. That makes hotel supplier selection one of the highest-leverage decisions in a travel business.
This guide covers how the models differ, what each supplier expects from you, and the operational details that decide whether hotel bookings are profitable or exhausting.
The two supply models
Bedbanks and wholesalers
A bedbank contracts rooms directly with hotels and chains, often in advance and at negotiated rates, then resells to agencies through an API. Hotelbeds is the best-known example; RateHawk, Stuba, Hotelston and TBO’s hotel division operate similarly.
You receive net rates. Your sell price is entirely your decision. This is where hotel margin comes from, and it is why bedbank connections are the backbone of most agency hotel programmes.
OTA affiliate programmes
Programmes such as Expedia’s affiliate offering or Agoda’s partner scheme let you display and book their inventory, typically for a commission rather than a net rate. Onboarding is easier and coverage can be excellent, but you are reselling someone else’s product at their price, with a fixed commission and generally less control over branding, servicing and the customer relationship.
The distinction that matters: with a bedbank you buy at net and choose your price. With an affiliate programme you sell at their price and receive a commission. The first is a business you control; the second is a revenue share.
How the main options compare
Rather than declaring a winner, here is what each is generally strong at. Coverage and rates change, so treat this as a starting point for your own testing.
| Supplier | Model | Generally strong on | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hotelbeds | Bedbank | Very large global inventory; strong in Europe, the Mediterranean and major city destinations | Formal certification before production access. Strict rules on voucher content and cancellation handling. Separate agreements for hotels, activities and transfers. |
| TBO | Bedbank / consolidator | India, Middle East and Asia; multi-product (also flights, transfers, sightseeing) | Onboards GCC and South Asian agencies readily. Wallet-based settlement. Commercial terms are negotiated rather than published. |
| RateHawk | Bedbank | Broad global coverage aggregated from multiple sources; competitive in CIS, Europe and Asia | Aggregates several suppliers, so the same property can appear at different rates. Good API documentation. |
| Stuba | Bedbank | Agency-focused; solid European and long-haul leisure coverage | Traditionally agency-oriented with responsive support. |
| Expedia TAAP / Agoda affiliate | Affiliate | Enormous inventory, especially Asia-Pacific for Agoda | Commission model rather than net rates. Less control over price, branding and servicing. |
The pattern worth noticing: strength is regional. A supplier with excellent Dubai and Riyadh coverage may be thin in Eastern Europe, and vice versa. Your customers’ destination mix should drive the choice far more than brand recognition.
What suppliers require before you go live
Hotel suppliers are generally more accessible than airline content, but there are still gates.
A commercial agreement. Nearly all bedbanks require a signed contract before production credentials. Test access is often granted earlier so development can proceed in parallel.
Certification, in some cases. Hotelbeds in particular reviews your integration before enabling production. The review typically checks that you follow the correct booking workflow, perform rate re-checks properly, display cancellation policies accurately, and include mandatory information on vouchers. It is a genuine review, not a formality, and turnaround depends on the reviewer.
A funded account. Most bedbanks operate prepaid or credit-line arrangements. Bookings draw against your balance. Plan the working capital.
Volume expectations. Some suppliers set minimum volume commitments or review your account if production is low. Ask about this before signing so it does not surprise you at renewal.
The operational details that cause real problems
These are the issues that consume support time after launch. They are not exotic — they are simply not obvious until they happen.
Rate re-check before booking
Search results are cached, and cached prices go stale. Most hotel APIs require a re-check call immediately before booking that returns the current, bookable price. Sometimes it differs from what was searched.
Your flow must handle this properly: show the customer the new price and ask them to confirm. Silently charging the higher amount produces chargebacks; failing the booking produces abandoned customers. Doing it well is a genuine competitive advantage because many platforms handle it badly.
Child ages are mandatory and must match
Hotel pricing depends on the exact ages of children, because occupancy rules and child policies vary by property. Suppliers require ages at search time, and the ages used at booking must match the search. Collecting “2 adults, 1 child” without an age will fail, and mismatched ages produce booking errors that look mysterious if you have not seen them before.
Cancellation policies are per-rate, not per-hotel
The same property can offer a fully refundable rate, a partially refundable rate and a non-refundable rate simultaneously. The policy belongs to the rate, includes specific deadlines, and must be displayed accurately to the customer before payment. Getting this wrong is both a customer service problem and a consumer protection issue.
Vouchers you must pass through
Some suppliers return their own voucher PDF and contractually require you to give the customer that document rather than generating your own. The property may not honour anything else. Your platform needs to detect when a supplier voucher exists and serve it, falling back to your own document only when it does not.
Cancellation is a money flow, not a status
Cancelling with the supplier is the easy part. You then need to calculate what the customer is owed after penalties, refund via the original payment method or wallet, credit the supplier refund back against your account, and record it all so your books reconcile. Many platforms ship with a cancel button that changes a status and leaves the money unaccounted for.
Mapping and duplicates
If you connect two suppliers, the same hotel appears twice with different identifiers, sometimes different names and different rates. Without property mapping your results look duplicated and unprofessional. Some aggregators provide mapping data; otherwise you need your own matching logic.
How to choose your first two suppliers
- List your top 20 destinations by actual or expected bookings.
- Ask each supplier for property counts in those specific destinations, not global totals. Global inventory numbers are marketing; local depth is what serves your customers.
- Run a live price comparison on test credentials — same properties, same dates, same occupancy — and compare net rates.
- Check the servicing model: can you cancel and amend by API, or does it require emailing an operations desk?
- Confirm the settlement currency and how it interacts with your own.
- Pick two with complementary strengths, not two that overlap. One regional specialist plus one broad global source is a common and effective pairing.
Why two suppliers is the practical minimum
Running two hotel sources is not over-engineering. It delivers four concrete benefits:
- Price competition. The same property is frequently cheaper on one supplier than another, and which one wins varies by destination and date. Searching both and showing the lower rate directly improves your competitiveness.
- Coverage. Where one is thin, the other fills the gap. Empty search results are the fastest way to lose a customer.
- Resilience. Outages happen. Contracts end. A second supplier means you keep trading.
- Negotiating position. Commercial reviews go differently when your business is not entirely dependent on one relationship.
The technical requirement is that your platform treats hotel suppliers as interchangeable adapters behind one interface, so a search fans out to both in parallel and results merge into a single ranked list. If that structure exists, adding a third supplier is a contained task rather than a project.
Margin: what is realistic
Hotel margins are genuinely better than flights, but they are not unlimited. Customers compare, and metasearch has made price transparency universal. A sensible approach is to vary markup by context rather than applying one blanket percentage:
- Lower markup on highly-comparable city hotels where customers shop hard.
- Higher markup on packages, resorts and destinations where direct comparison is harder.
- Different rates for B2C and B2B — agents expect thinner margins and deliver volume.
- Consider fixed-amount markups on low-value bookings, where a percentage yields too little to cover the cost of servicing.
A platform with a markup engine that supports rules by product, supplier, destination and channel makes this practical. Without one you are choosing between leaving money on the table and pricing yourself out.
Getting started sensibly
Connect one bedbank with strong coverage in your core destinations. Get the full lifecycle working properly — search, re-check, book, voucher, cancel, refund, reconcile — before adding anything else. A single supplier working correctly end to end is worth more than three suppliers that only search.
Then add a second source and turn on comparison. That is usually where hotel revenue moves from acceptable to competitive.
Content quality: the difference customers actually see
Rates get the attention in supplier comparisons, but content quality determines conversion. Two suppliers can offer the same property at the same price and produce very different booking rates.
What to examine when testing:
- Images — how many, at what resolution, and are they of the property or generic stock?
- Descriptions — useful detail, or a paragraph of marketing copy? Are they available in the languages you sell in?
- Amenities — structured data you can filter on, or free text you cannot?
- Room descriptions — can a customer tell the difference between the room types on offer, or are they cryptic supplier codes?
- Geolocation — accurate coordinates so map search works properly.
- Review data — available at all, and can you display it under the licence terms?
Thin content produces a results page customers do not trust. If your primary supplier has excellent rates but poor content, one common approach is to enrich listings using a second source’s content while booking through the cheaper supplier — but check the licensing terms before doing so, since content is usually licensed for use with that supplier’s inventory.
Static data and why it needs a refresh routine
Hotel APIs separate dynamic data (availability and price, fetched live) from static data (property details, images, facilities, room types). Static data is usually distributed as a bulk file you download periodically rather than requested per search — it is far too large to fetch in real time.
This creates an operational obligation that is easy to overlook. Properties close, rename, renovate and change categories. Room types are added and retired. If your static content is a year old, you will display hotels that no longer exist and room descriptions that no longer match what the guest receives.
Build a scheduled refresh from the start — monthly is usually sufficient — and monitor for properties that disappear from the feed, since those need removing from your search index rather than silently failing at booking. Suppliers typically publish guidance on refresh frequency; following it is the difference between a catalogue that stays accurate and one that quietly rots.
Frequently asked questions
What is a bedbank?
A bedbank contracts hotel rooms directly with properties and chains, often in advance at negotiated rates, then resells that inventory to travel agencies through an API. You buy at a net rate and set your own retail price, which is why bedbank connections generally produce better margins than commission-based affiliate programmes.
Which hotel API has the best coverage?
Coverage is regional rather than absolute. A supplier with excellent Europe and Mediterranean inventory may be thin in the Gulf or Southeast Asia. Ask each supplier for property counts in your top 20 destinations specifically, rather than comparing global inventory totals, and verify with live searches on test credentials.
Why do hotel prices change between search and booking?
Search results are cached for speed, and rates change constantly. Most hotel APIs require a re-check call immediately before booking that returns the current bookable price. When it differs, the correct behaviour is to show the customer the new price and ask them to confirm rather than silently charging more.
Do I need to use the supplier's voucher?
Sometimes yes. Certain suppliers return their own voucher PDF and contractually require you to give the customer that document, because the property may not accept anything else. Your platform should detect when a supplier voucher is provided and serve it, generating your own only when none exists.
How many hotel suppliers should I connect?
Two is the practical minimum. A second supplier gives price competition on the same properties, fills coverage gaps, protects you against outages and contract changes, and improves your negotiating position. The requirement is a platform that can search multiple suppliers in parallel and merge the results.
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