Global Travel Distribution: 7 Ways Hotelbeds Helps Distributors Succeed
In the often fragmented travel industry, tour operators, online travel agents, and travel professionals face challenges like managing large inventories, maintaining competitive pricing, and adapting to market shifts.
What's more, as travellers continually demand increasingly diverse offerings from travel distributors, it becomes even more important to find solutions for these challenges in order to gain, and maintain, your competitive edge in your market. And when the B2B market itself is projected to reach around $55 billion USD by 2030, it's clear how crucial staying competitive is in order to capture a slice of this valuable segment.
Many distributors struggle with operational inefficiencies and limited inventory access. Industry experts agree that strategic partnerships are key to growth, remaining competitive and expanding market share.
Partnering with a dedicated B2B travel partner like Hotelbeds offers the tools and networks needed to overcome these hurdles and seize growth opportunities. This article highlights how Hotelbeds helps you succeed amid rising competition and evolving traveller demands.
1. Access to Extensive Inventory and Simplified Booking Management
Today’s traveller is prioritising a seamless booking experience, and often grows frustrated with complex, disjointed processes - with around half of consumers (47%) dropping out of the online booking journey mid-way during the holiday booking process, if this is too long or complicated.
In order to capture travellers who are increasingly seeking a seamless booking experience, an intuitive, all-in-one platform is essential.
However, managing diverse inventories and multiple supplier relationships often leads to inefficiencies and limited options for travellers. In fact, a significant number of travel companies cite inventory management as a major operational challenge, resulting in lost sales and customer dissatisfaction.
Partnering with Hotelbeds provides instant access to:
- Over 300,000 travel products across 170+ countries - 250,000+ accommodations, experiences, transfers, and car hire from 500+ suppliers – all through a single platform.
- Intuitive booking management tools - to simplify the booking journey, allowing travel distributors to offer a wide range of options quickly, and offer a more comprehensive travel booking experience to all customers.
Ultimately, this enables you to respond more quickly to market demand, create competitive packages, and improve customer satisfaction, driving loyalty and repeat bookings.
Hotelbeds’ Strategic Support
Our partnership with lastminute.com case study demonstrates how our platform and dedicated support enabled the company to significantly grow its last-minute booking segment. Hotelbeds provided real-time access to a vast inventory, advanced dynamic pricing tools, and seamless API integrations, allowing lastminute.com to respond quickly to market trends and customer demands.
Hotelbeds’ ongoing support in inventory management and technology integration helped lastminute.com optimise its offerings and improve operational agility, directly contributing to increased revenue and customer satisfaction.
Read the full partnership story here
2. Dynamic Pricing and Revenue Optimisation
Maintaining competitive prices while ensuring profitability remains a persistent challenge, especially in the face of fluctuating demand and regional variations.
Recent industry insights indicate that price is a critical factor in the customer decision-making journey, with studies showing that up to 70% of travellers prioritise price when choosing a hotel. This underscores the necessity for accurate, real-time pricing strategies.
Hotelbeds offers sophisticated price plans and real-time availability updates, courtesy of our Cache API, just one of the tools in our comprehensive suite of API solutions which enable you as travel distributors to optimise your offering with competitive pricing and accurate availabilities. This empowers you to remain competitive and maximise your profits effectively.
Additionally, the Hotelbeds Preferred Partner programme provides an exclusive collection of hotels with guaranteed rates, negotiated by our dedicated sales and sourcing expert teams.
When you book with Preferred Partners, you’re accessing a curated portfolio of top-performing hotels that offer guaranteed competitive rates, more availability, and stronger conversion opportunities as a result. The Preferred Partner collection is provided solely to Hotelbeds partners, serving as a key differentiator in your offerings.
Complementing this, throughout the year, you can benefit from exclusive global and regional promotional campaigns as a Hotelbeds partner, which empower you with in-demand, competitive offerings to better serve the preferences and demands of your desired audience.
3. Accelerating Global Expansion through Strategic Partnerships
With the UN Tourism reporting over 1.1 billion international travellers by September last year, and a clamour for ‘detour destinations’ and increasing prioritisation of new destinations and experiences for 56% of today's travellers, according to the WTM Global Travel Report 2025, finding stable footing in new destinations is now critical for success.
Market expansion presents widely faced challenges for travel distribution and travel professionals, and distributors often face substantial resource investments and complexities when expanding into new regions. These hurdles are among the key obstacles that prevent seamless market entry and sustainable expansion.
However, these challenges are not insurmountable. With the right travel partner – one that possesses local expertise, a comprehensive network, and proven experience in market development – distributors can streamline their entry process, reduce risks, and accelerate growth.
Strategic partnerships enable companies to leverage established relationships, access valuable market insights, and deploy resources more effectively, ultimately transforming barriers into opportunities for success. With the right partner, distributors can quickly establish a foothold in new regions, reducing time-to-market and risk, ultimately expanding their global footprint.
Hotelbeds’ Strategic Support
With tiket.com, Hotelbeds played a crucial role in accelerating their international expansion. By benefiting from dedicated and proactive management and the tailored implementation of our API solutions to facilitate the smooth integration of our global inventory, tiket.com were able to effectively scale their offerings and expand beyond regional borders to attract new customers in international markets.
Read the full partnership story
4. Promoting Sustainable Travel and Meeting Consumer Expectations
Consumers increasingly seek eco-friendly options, yet many platforms lack clear sustainable choices. In fact, around nine in ten global travellers want to make more sustainable choices in 2026, including travel options (according to Tourism Economics, in a report in collaboration with World Travel Market.)
While the demand is clearly present, the ‘say-do gap’ is rife. In fact, only 51% of travellers believe individual choices drive real change, which results in consumers expecting brands to 'lead with credible proof and practical value', according to Euromonitor.
Therefore, it's important for travel distributors to effectively and authentically communicate the sustainable options that are available to travellers, not only to attract sustainably-minded travellers, but to help move the needle on sustainability as an ingrained offering from the point of sale.
To help you accomplish this, Hotelbeds offers a portfolio of eco-certified accommodations to make marketing responsible tourism easy. This way, it becomes simpler to capture the valuable audience of travellers wishing for more responsible travel options, but aren't always sure where to find them easily.
Our Sustainable Hotels Programme allows distributors to easily find and promote sustainable offerings with the 'Sustainable' Hotels' filter in our online travel booking platform.
These hotels are only shown if they have sustainable certification, provided by industry-leading organisations such as the World Tourism and Trade Council (WTTC) and the Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC), or have developed sustainability programmes of their own, with equal or higher sustainability standards.
By showcasing certified hotels and resorts, B2B travel wholesalers are avoiding the increasing sensitivity to ‘greenwashing’, where the sustainable claim does not match the reality of the product offered, in order to capture more bookings from sustainably-minded travellers.
5. Seamless Integration through API Solutions
When it comes to travel distribution, disconnected or fragmented systems and manual processes lead to errors, delays, and scalability issues. To mitigate this, organisations implementing API integrations can see in a dramatic reduction in operational costs and implementation times, in some cases by as much as 30%.
Hotelbeds offers comprehensive API solutions that enable seamless integration with booking engines, CRM, and other operational platforms, automating workflows and ensuring real-time data synchronisation.
Our three API solutions, gathered into our powerful API Suite, are built to empower your business and activate an optimised travel booking experience for both your business and end customers.
This API suite involves a Booking API, Content API and Cache API to enhance every stage of the booking and travel management journey for you and offer a better booking experience for your customers.
The Main Benefits of Hotelbeds’ API Solutions:
- Quick access to a global inventory of accommodations, experiences and mobility products like transfers and car hire.
- Streamlined integration of reservation details into websites and apps.
- Simple search for travel product options.
- Quick and direct confirmation of bookings.
- Tools for partners to manage and update their inventory.
- Live-updated pricing information on pricing and availability.
Discover more about our travel API solutions here, and learn how these can help you operate more efficiently, reduce manual effort, and accelerate your time-to-market for new products and offers.
6. Data-Driven Decision Making and Market Insights
The power of making data-backed decisions can't be overstated, but making strategic decisions without reliable data can hamper growth and your overall competitiveness. Other travel companies end up benefitting from opportunities you either don’t have visibility on, or that are proposed as a result of strategic partnerships from experts, designed to aid their growth – much like the support that Hotelbeds partners receive from our dedicated client management teams, whose goal is your growth.
In fact, research suggests that B2B travel companies using advanced analytics report higher percentage increases in productivity and better market positioning. Analytics can boost sales via targeted campaigns, while personalisation based on customer preferences helps uplift satisfaction and therefore loyalty.
Our analytics tools, such as Insights, provide detailed travel data into market preferences booking trends, and market performance so that you can not only keep up with your competition, but also with the needs of the market.
This search and recommendation tool is driven by intelligent algorithms that learn from your input and preferences, resulting in an interactive tool that allows you to identify growth opportunities in your market and capitalise on this valuable potential for your business.
The impact of using Insights is that you, as travel distributors, can optimise marketing campaigns, inventory allocation, and pricing strategies, leading to higher conversion rates and profitability.
7. Enhancing Reputation and Market Credibility
Partnering with a well-established and trusted B2B platform like Hotelbeds can significantly bolster a travel distributor’s market credibility. Association with a reputable global provider enhances consumer trust, making customers more confident in booking through your platform.
Hotelbeds’ reputation as a leading and reliable distribution partner lends a sense of stability and quality assurance to its partners. This association signals to customers and suppliers alike that your offerings are backed by a global leader with a proven track record of service excellence and security.
This can translate into increased customer confidence, higher conversion rates, and greater willingness among suppliers to collaborate, knowing their products are promoted through a trusted channel.
Why Travel Distributors Should Partner with Hotelbeds
In an industry where agility, inventory breadth, and customer experience are key, partnering with a dedicated B2B travel partner like Hotelbeds offers tangible benefits.
Plus, as part of HBX Group, a leading B2B travel marketplace, connecting with Hotelbeds means becoming part of a powerful travel ecosystem at the forefront of shaping the future of the travel industry.
- Access to a vast, diverse inventory that appeals to a broader customer base.
- Advanced technology solutions, including APIs and dynamic pricing, that streamline operations.
- Expertise and local partnerships that facilitate rapid expansion into new markets.
- Tools to promote sustainable travel, aligning with consumer values and market trends.
- Valuable insights and analytics to inform strategic decisions and stay ahead of competitors.
Enhance your travel business today by signing up to access tailored Hotelbeds solutions, and join the wider HBX Group ecosystem, dedicated to connecting the wider travel industry and designed to support your growth as travel distributors.