Hotel Wholesalers, Bedbanks and B2B Portals: Who Actually Holds the Room?

A room at a four-star resort in Phuket can reach your screen through four different companies. The hotel may only know the first one. That gap is where most of the trouble in hotel distribution starts, and it is the reason to know exactly which hotel wholesalers sit between you and the room you're selling.

What follows is the chain as a contracting manager sees it: who signs what with whom, where each company takes its cut, and what happens to your client when one link stops paying. At the end is a checklist you can run on any rate from any supplier, including us.

Key Takeaways

• Bedbanks, hotel wholesalers, consolidators and B2B portals all resell hotel rooms at net rates. The real difference between them is who holds the contract with the hotel.
• One net rate can be resold through two or three intermediaries before you see it. Every extra layer adds margin, delay and risk.
• When a company in the middle fails, the hotel usually goes unpaid and the guest is asked to pay again at the front desk. It happened after Lowcostbeds collapsed in 2016 and after Thomas Cook in 2019.
• Padded cancellation deadlines, slow hotel confirmation numbers and generic room names are the usual fingerprints of a long chain.
• Hotels police wholesale rates closely, and the tools for catching leaks keep getting better. A rate that leaks onto a public site gets pulled, and the reseller who leaked it can be cut off.
• A B2B portal is a layer too. Judge it on what it shows you before you pay, not on the logo.

What hotel wholesalers actually do

Strip away the jargon and a hotel wholesaler does one job. It agrees a net rate with a hotel, or buys one from somebody who did, and resells that room to travel sellers who add their own margin before the guest pays.

Mews, the hotel software company, put it plainly in an April 2026 explainer: a bed bank "contracts discounted net rates from hotels and redistributes that inventory to travel sellers", and the word wholesaler is "largely interchangeable" with bed bank. You can read the full piece on the Mews blog.

In daily use the labels blur badly. A Dubai DMC with 300 direct hotel contracts in Deira and Downtown calls itself a wholesaler. So does a consolidator in Delhi that owns no contracts at all and buys everything through APIs. Both are telling the truth. They simply sit at different points on the same line, and that position matters more than the name on the business card.

The table sorts out the names you'll hear most often and what each one means for your bookings.

Two things in that table matter more to you than the rest. Only some of these companies hold a contract with the hotel. And the hotel can usually see the company holding that contract, but nobody further down the line, which includes you. If you want the finer distinction between a wholesaler and a consolidator, our older post on travel consolidators vs wholesalers goes through it.

How a hotel room travels from the property to your quote

Take an ordinary file of yours. A family of 4, 3 nights in July, a resort in Nusa Dua on Bali, booked 6 weeks out. On a typical day the room makes this trip to your screen.

1. The hotel loads its rates. Revenue staff set prices and availability in the PMS, and a channel manager or central reservation system (CRS) sends them out to every connected seller.
2. A bedbank picks them up. Either through a contract signed months ago at a fixed seasonal price, or through a live connection that prices off the public hotel rate minus an agreed discount.
3. A reseller buys from the bedbank. This might be a regional wholesaler, a consolidator or a B2B portal. It adds its margin and passes the rate on.
4. Sometimes a second reseller buys from the first. This is the step nobody puts in their brochure.
5. You see the rate, add your markup and send the client a price.
6. The booking climbs back up the same ladder. Each company hands it to the one above until it lands in the hotel PMS, usually filed under the name of whichever company holds the contract, not your agency.

Mews again: "one net rate can pass through multiple hands before it reaches a consumer-facing booking page." The same is true of the page you quote from. Every hand takes a few per cent and adds a few minutes, sometimes a few hours, to the time it takes your booking to reach the front desk.

Money moves the other way, and more slowly. You pay your portal, the portal pays its supplier, that supplier pays the bedbank, and the bedbank pays the hotel, often after the guest has already checked out. If anyone in the middle sits on your cash, the hotel waits.

This is the part that bites.

Static contracted rates and dynamic rates

Wholesale used to run almost entirely on static contracts. A hotel agreed a net price per room type per season, it went on a rate sheet, and the wholesaler sold at that price until the season ended. Mews describes the shift since then towards dynamic rates, where the net price is tied to the best available rate of the hotel with a fixed discount and "fencing" rules about where the rate may be shown.

For you the difference is practical, not academic. Static rates are predictable and you can quote them weeks ahead, but they go stale: a hotel running a flash sale can end up cheaper on its own website than in your wholesale feed. Dynamic rates move every day, so the quote you sent your client on Monday may not hold on Thursday. Neither model is better. You just need to know which one you're holding before you promise a client a price, and our piece on dynamic vs static hotel pricing covers the quoting side in more detail.

The big hotel wholesalers, by the numbers

The top of the market is a handful of very large companies. These are the most recent published figures we could find. Dates are included because these numbers move quickly and old ones get quoted for years.

• HBX Group (Hotelbeds). Listed on the Spanish exchanges in February 2025 at €11.50 a share. In the year to 30 September 2025 it reported total transaction value of €8,178 million, up 8%, on revenue of €720 million. By August 2026 Skift was describing a squeeze: its take rate had fallen to 7.3% in the third quarter of its 2026 financial year, against the 9% assumed in its listing prospectus, and the shares were down nearly a third from the IPO price.
• Web Travel Group (WebBeds). The Australian-listed owner of WebBeds reported total transaction value of $5.8 billion for the year to 31 March 2026, up 20%, with bookings up 18%, in its FY26 results. The same release said trading in Asia-Pacific and the Middle East had been hit by the conflict in the region.
• TBO Tek. The listed Indian B2B travel distributor. On its first-quarter FY26 earnings call, as reported by Inc42, hotels and ancillaries made up about 62% of gross transaction value but more than 85% of gross profit. That gap tells you where the money in B2B travel actually sits.
• Expedia Group B2B business. Skift put its gross bookings at $35.7 billion, which makes it the largest seller of hotel rooms to other businesses. The same report named the newer Booking.com Partner Services unit as a competitor in the space.

Why would a 3-person agency in Kochi or Cebu care about the take rate of a Spanish company? Our reading is simple. When the large hotel wholesalers earn less per booking, they chase volume, and volume in this trade usually means selling to more resellers. Longer chains follow.

How many hotel wholesalers sit between you and the room?

Usually 1 or 2. Sometimes 4. You're rarely told which.

The trade name for the long version is daisy-chaining. A rate is contracted by one bedbank, sold to a second wholesaler, sold again to a consolidator, and finally loaded onto a portal you log into. Each company has a contract only with its immediate neighbours, and you sit at the very end. Nobody in the middle can see both ends of the line, and the hotel can see only one of them.

That arrangement works perfectly well for you while everybody pays on time. It stops working the day somebody doesn't.

What happens when a link breaks

Three British failures, in 2014, 2016 and 2019, show the pattern clearly enough.

Lowcostbeds, 2016. When Lowcost Travel Group stopped trading on 15 July 2016 it left a shortfall of £65 million. Its trade bedbank, Lowcostbeds, supplied other travel companies, and Travolution reported fears of knock-on failures. Alan Bowen of the Association of ATOL Companies said bookings had gone through "two or three wholesalers" and added: "It's a convoluted chain. There may well be consumers with hotel bookings not paid."

On Holiday Group, 2014. When the group went into administration, Travel Weekly reported £19 million of forward bookings and at least £7 million owed to creditors, mostly overseas hotels. Clients who were already away were asked to pay their hotels in resort and claim the money back from their agents.

Thomas Cook, 2019. Not a bedbank, but the clearest example of what unpaid hotels do. According to Reuters and AP reports at the time, guests in Tunisia and Spain were asked to pay their hotel bills a second time.

The lesson for you is uncomfortable. Your guest is holding your voucher. The hotel is holding an unpaid invoice addressed to someone else. At the front desk, the invoice usually wins.

There is a legal twist as well. A Travel Weekly opinion piece on bed bank liability made the point that whether a bed bank acts as agent or as principal decides who carries the loss. This is almost never spelled out on a booking screen. We have not seen a comparable bedbank failure in 2025 or 2026, but the structure that made those losses possible is still there.

Rate leakage: why hotels watch wholesale rates so closely

Hotels have their own complaint about wholesalers, and it's a fair one. Net rates meant for packages or private quotes keep turning up on public websites below the hotel's own price.

Mews calls margin dilution through undercutting "the biggest commercial risk in wholesale", and cites a 2025 Expedia Group survey in which nearly all of the hoteliers asked said they'd lost income to rate leakage. This is the context for every restriction you see attached to a wholesale rate.

The big bedbanks responded years ago. In November 2019 Hotelbeds said it had cut rate-integrity problems by about 90% in six months, down to 0.01% of room nights, and that it had given up roughly €300 million of sales to get there. Its "three strike" policy disconnects customers caught selling opaque rates through OTAs. Those are figures Hotelbeds published itself, but the policy shaped how most suppliers now treat leaks.

Hotels buy tools to catch leaks too. In June 2026 Lighthouse and Bowerbird Technologies announced a joint parity product and said in their release that wholesale redistribution chains are where misuse typically starts, partly because a hotel often can't see which reseller sold its room at what public price. They reported a Radisson pilot that cut parity losses by about a quarter. Vendor figures again, so treat them as a direction rather than a measurement.

What it means for you and your agency is straightforward. If you publish a wholesale rate on your website, in your social posts or in a metasearch feed, assume someone will find it. The rate gets pulled, your supplier gets a warning, and your supplier passes that warning to you. Quote your net rates privately, inside a package price or a client proposal, and you never have that conversation. Our post on hotel rate parity covers how to quote against OTA prices without breaking the rules.

How to tell how deep a rate is: a checklist

You can't see the chain, but you can see its fingerprints. Run any new supplier, or any rate that looks too good, through these 7 checks.

1. Compare the cancellation deadline with the policy on the hotel website. Each layer tends to pad the deadline by 1 day or more to protect itself. If your refundable rate must be cancelled 10 or 14 days before arrival, at a hotel whose own website allows 48 hours, it has probably passed through several hands before it reached you.
2. Watch how long the hotel confirmation number takes. A direct or one-step booking often returns the reference from the hotel itself within hours. If yours routinely take days, or the number never arrives, your booking is travelling a long way.
3. Read the room names. "Standard Room, 1 Double Bed" at a Patong or Seminyak resort that sells "Garden Pool Villa" and "Deluxe Ocean Wing" suggests the rate you're looking at has been mapped and re-mapped by systems that don't know the property well.
4. Check the price against the public hotel rate for the same conditions. Wholesale should beat it, modestly. If you find a refundable rate 35% under the hotel website, you're holding either a package rate that shouldn't be sold alone or a pricing error. Neither ends well for you.
5. Read the remarks. Phrases such as "for package sale only", "not to be displayed" or "opaque" tell you the rate carries conditions you inherit the moment you sell it to your client.
6. Ask your supplier directly. "Do you hold the contract with this hotel, or do you buy it from another wholesaler?" A good supplier will answer. Some won't, and that is an answer too.
7. Reconfirm anything that matters. For your honeymoons, groups and peak dates such as Christmas, Chinese New Year or Eid, contact the hotel 48 to 72 hours before check-in with the guest name and the confirmation number. It takes you 10 minutes and can save you the worst phone call of your month.

None of these proves a chain is long. Taken together, they tell you where to look, and in our experience the cancellation deadline and the confirmation number are the two that matter most.

How our portal handles the same hotel from several sources

We're one of the companies in this chain, so it's only fair that we explain what happens on our side, on DMC Quote.

When you search our hotels, we pull rates from a small number of connected supply sources plus the hotels we contract directly. The same property often exists in more than one feed, under different codes and slightly different names, so every hotel is matched to a single master record. There are about 1.53 million of those, covering 190+ countries. The matching scores each candidate on GPS distance, name similarity, star rating, phone number and postcode. Clear matches link automatically; borderline ones go into a queue for a person to review.

That matching is what stops you seeing the same hotel 3 times with 3 prices and no way of telling them apart. You get one hotel card from us instead. Most hotels come through a single source. Where more than one source has availability, their rates sit together on that card, sorted cheapest first, with rates from hotels we contract directly shown at the top.

We don't show supplier names, and that's deliberate. What helps you sell is the room, the meal plan, the cancellation terms and the price, not the name of a company 3 steps up the line. What we do show you is everything you inherit from them. Supplier remarks and any mandatory fees your guest pays at the hotel, such as a resort fee or city tax, appear before you pay us. The voucher prints the hotel confirmation number when we have it, says "Pending" when we don't yet, and carries a 24/7 emergency line, +65 8948 0242.

One more thing you'll notice early. On supplier rates, the free-cancellation deadline you see is set earlier than the real supplier deadline, on purpose, so there's time to cancel upstream before charges begin. It's the same padding described in the checklist above. We'd rather tell you about it now than have you discover it on a busy Friday.

A portal is a layer too

It would be convenient to finish with "so book everything through a portal". That would not be honest. A B2B portal is itself one of the intermediaries in your chain, and it adds its own margin. What a good one should give you in return is visibility: one search instead of your 5 logins, terms you can read before you pay, a person who answers at 3am when your guest is standing at reception, and a straight answer about who pays whom.

Questions you should ask any portal, us included:

• Do you hold the contract with this hotel, or does someone upstream?
• When do you pay your supplier, and what happens to my booking if that supplier fails?
• How quickly will I get the hotel confirmation number?
• Is there a human on the phone outside office hours?

If you get vague answers, you're usually looking at a long chain.

When going direct is the better call

For some of your business you should skip the wholesalers entirely. If you send groups of 10 rooms or more, stays of 20 nights and up, repeat volume to the same property or MICE blocks, you'll usually do better on a direct contract or an allotment you negotiate yourself. Our guides on negotiating hotel rates and on hotel allotment contracts explain how. Wholesale wins on breadth: the 400 hotels you book twice a year each and could never contract one by one. Plenty of agencies end up using both.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a hotel wholesaler?

A hotel wholesaler buys rooms at net rates, through direct contracts or live connections to hotels and other suppliers, and resells them to travel agents, tour operators and online sellers, who add their own margin. The largest ones are usually called bedbanks.

Is a bedbank the same as a hotel wholesaler?

In practice, yes. Both describe companies reselling hotel rooms at net rates to the travel trade. Some people keep "bedbank" for the global, API-driven players and "wholesaler" for regional companies working from static contracts, but the business model is the same.

How do travel agents book hotels for clients?

Most agents use one or more B2B portals or bedbanks that show net rates, add their markup and send the client a quote or a package price. For the hotels they use most, and for groups, they also negotiate direct contracts. If you're starting out, one portal plus a couple of direct contracts is plenty. A smaller number still book on consumer sites and wait for commission, which is slower and usually less profitable.

What is a hotel consolidator?

A reseller that buys from several hotel wholesalers and bedbanks and offers the combined stock through one platform, mostly to smaller agencies that can't manage many supplier accounts. A consolidator rarely holds hotel contracts of its own, so it adds another layer to the chain.

Why is a wholesale rate sometimes cheaper than the hotel's own website?

Hotels give wholesalers lower net rates in return for volume and the promise that the rate stays hidden inside a package or a private quote. If a wholesale rate is far below the public price, it may carry package-only conditions, so read the remarks before selling it on its own.

Do I need IATA accreditation to buy from hotel wholesalers?

Not usually. Most bedbanks and B2B portals ask for proof that you run a registered travel business rather than for IATA. On DMC Quote, IATA is optional: registration is free and our team reviews each application before approving it.

If you'd like to see how one hotel looks across several sources on a single screen, you can register free as a travel agent. There's no subscription and no minimum volume, and our B2B hotel booking page explains what's included. The registration guide lists what the form asks for.