Hotelbeds API integration for bed bank inventory on your portal

What Hotelbeds is and what APItude covers

Hotelbeds is the flagship bed bank brand of HBX Group. It contracts hotel rooms at wholesale rates and distributes them to travel trade buyers: online travel agencies, tour operators, airlines, points programmes and wholesalers. Distribution is API-first through the APItude suite, a REST-based set of services (JSON is the preferred format, with XML also supported) that covers hotel search and availability, rate checking, booking, modification and cancellation, plus separate content and cache services for static hotel data.

For a portal owner the attraction is simple: one commercial agreement and one integration puts a very large pool of wholesale hotel inventory behind your own brand, with your own pricing on top. The work sits in doing that integration properly, which is what this page describes. If you are still comparing suppliers, start with our broader hotel API integration service, which covers how bed banks, channel managers and aggregators fit together.

What access requires

We are an independent development company. Access to Hotelbeds inventory always comes from your own commercial relationship with Hotelbeds: you register as a client, sign their agreement, and receive API credentials for the test environment. Typical prerequisites are a registered travel business, expected booking volumes you can talk about honestly, and a target market. Once you have test keys, we take over the technical work; if you have not applied yet, we can advise on what the process involves, but the agreement and the rates are between you and Hotelbeds.

One thing worth planning early: bed bank contracts distinguish between cached-price models and live-request models, and your allowed request volumes depend on the agreement. The architecture we build has to match the contract you signed, so involve us before you commit to a model if you can.

What we integrate

• Availability and rates: destination, geolocation and hotel-code searches with board, room and rate-type filters
• Rate check and booking: the two-step confirm flow, including rate comments, cancellation policies and rekeying protection
• Cancellation and modification: automated cancellation inside the free-cancellation window and controlled handling outside it
• Content: hotel descriptions, images, facilities and category data loaded and refreshed on a schedule
• Booking retrieval and reconciliation: pulling booking lists for your back office and matching them against supplier invoices

The front end can be your existing site, a new hotel booking engine, or a white-label hotel booking website we build alongside the integration.

Hotel and room mapping, and de-duplication

If Hotelbeds is your only supplier, mapping is straightforward. Most of our clients, though, run two or more sources: a second bed bank such as RateHawk, a GDS hotel feed, or direct contracts loaded through an extranet. The same physical hotel then arrives with different codes, names, spellings and room taxonomies from each source, and an unmapped portal shows the traveller three duplicate listings with three different prices.

We solve this with a mapping layer: a master hotel record per property, supplier codes attached to it, and matching done on coordinates, name normalisation and address signals, with a manual review queue for uncertain matches. Room-level mapping is harder than hotel-level mapping because room names are free text, so we map conservatively and group rather than merge when confidence is low. The result is one listing per property with the best available price on top, which is what makes a multi-supplier portal feel like a real OTA rather than a directory.

Cache versus live availability

Hitting a supplier live for every visitor search is slow and burns through request quotas. Caching everything makes results stale and produces booking failures at confirmation. A good Hotelbeds integration uses both, deliberately:

The exact split depends on your traffic pattern and your agreement. High-traffic metasearch-style pages lean on the shopping cache; the booking step always revalidates live so travellers are never charged against a stale rate.

Markup rules, currency and pricing control

Wholesale net rates only make you money if the markup layer is right. We build markup engines that apply rules by market, destination, hotel category, board basis, booking window and channel, with agent-specific tiers if you run a B2B travel portal. Currency conversion, rounding rules and price-display compliance for your target markets are part of the same layer, and every rule change is logged so your finance team can reconstruct how any price was produced.

Certification and go-live

1. 01

   Test-environment build

   We develop against your test credentials: search, rate check, booking, cancellation and content flows, plus error handling for the failure cases the API documents.

2. 02

   Internal QA

   Booking lifecycle tests including cancellations inside and outside policy, price-change handling at confirmation, and timeout recovery.

3. 03

   Supplier certification

   Hotelbeds reviews integrations before production access. We prepare the required test cases and logs and handle the review process on your behalf.

4. 04

   Production cutover

   Credentials switched, low-volume live pilot, monitoring and alerting enabled, then full traffic.

Timeline factors and ongoing support

The variables that move a Hotelbeds project are: whether a booking front end already exists, how many other suppliers must be mapped, whether your agreement is signed before development starts, and how quickly certification is scheduled. We quote a fixed price per scope after a discovery call rather than publishing a generic estimate. After go-live we offer monitoring and maintenance plans that cover API version changes, content refresh jobs and booking-failure alerts, as part of our wider travel API integration practice.

Hotelbeds and APItude are trademarks of their respective owner (HBX Group). Globitude Travels & Tech is an independent software integrator. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by or a reseller for Hotelbeds, and we do not sell or resell its inventory; commercial terms and inventory access are agreed directly between you and the supplier.