A bed bank is a business-to-business platform that aggregates hotel inventory at net rates and distributes it to thousands of resellers, such as travel agencies, tour operators and smaller OTAs, through APIs.
Bed banks industrialized the wholesale model. Instead of negotiating with hundreds of agencies, a hotel signs one bed bank contract and its rooms reach a global reseller network automatically. Hotelbeds is the best known example of the category.
The trade-off is control. Once inventory enters a bed bank, the hotel rarely knows who resells it or at what final price, and unauthorized public resale is the typical parity headache. Tight contract clauses and active monitoring are the standard defenses.
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