You’re managing hotel bookings across six different suppliers. Your team finds out that the same room was booked twice, but Supplier #3 doesn’t sync in real-time. The customer is upset. After two hours, your team fixed it. This happens weekly.
Travel agencies lose a lot of money due to lack of coordination with suppliers. According to research by Mize.tech for travel agency operations manning around trips, manual coordination with all our suppliers is 15-20 hours per week per team member. For a three-man team, that’s 40-60 hours of pure overhead per week.
This Guide offers advice on reducing waste, reconciling rate disparities, and increasing customer satisfaction. Whether you have 3 suppliers or 10, these strategies grow as your agency does.
Travel companies don’t always measure the real cost of poor supplier management. Knowing these costs provokes substantial investments in better systems.
The same hotel rooms on different suppliers’ sites are offered at different prices. The identical property shows $120 on Supplier A while showing $130 from Supplier B. Agents booking that are not aware of these differences are missing out on commission optimization opportunities. According to data from Hotelbeds, Rate Parity issues between multiple channels can reduce effective commission by 5%-10%. To an agency with $500,000 in bookings, this is a minimum of $25-50K out the door.
One mid-sized agency in Miami learned they were losing an estimated $32,000 per year by consistently booking with a supplier who paid lower commissions. Their brokers just looked up the first supplier they had in their system and sought prices. They were able to recover 70% of this lost margin after operating in the first year with automated rate monitoring.
Supplier confirmations need to be manually checked by teams, rates synced on various platforms reconcile, and conflicts resolved. This manual process prevents scalability. The bigger your agency, the larger it can only be if the size of your staff directly grows with it.
In a small agency (2-3 people), one person usually spends 10 to 15 hours each week coordinating suppliers. Medium-sized agencies (5-10 team members) also generally have a full-time role that is solely responsible for supplier management. Big firms (10 or more people) might need one or two coordinators alone. At $25-35 per hour for credentialed personnel, this labor cost adds up fast
Various suppliers are strong in various areas and categories of property: Supplier A is the king of European luxury hotels, and Supplier B is the queen of budget properties in Asia. When your team’s eyes can’t see these clefts, they search for the wrong supplier first and overlook properties that are available for sale. Inadequate availability of data and your travel agency lose 10 – 15% of potential bookings because of inaccuracy with the details.
A corporate travel agency, one that specializes in corporate travel, didn’t know their main GDS took weak inventory into Southeast Asia. Before they found the gap, they lost five big corporate accounts to competitors. Overall revenue impact was more than $150,000 per year.
Travel agencies work with distinct supplier types, each offering different advantages and presenting specific integration challenge:
Sabre, Amadeus, and Travelport are the central nervous system of corporate travel. They offer access to negotiated corporate rates and a global footprint. But integration with GDS systems is an involved and expensive process usually between $5,000 to 15,000 up front plus $500 to 2000 monthly fees and has higher per-transaction costs ($2–5 per booking). They are most useful for corporate travel, but they may not have the best rates for leisure travel.
Platforms such as Hotelbeds, WebBeds, RateHawk and others all connect directly with hotel chains and independent properties. They have competitive prices and vast inventory. They claim to have partnerships with more than 250,000 properties worldwide (Hotelbeds’ facts and figures).
Depending on the API arbitrage integration costs : basic costing $2,000-8,000 with monthly fees at $200-800 and enterprise starting prices over 20,000$. Each bed bank has its own API integration and can have unique connectivity needs. The most successful agencies work with 2-3 of the top bed banks to achieve good coverage.
Software such as SiteMinder and Cloud beds help hotels manage their distribution of inventory across different channels. Real-time inventory availability is accessible for these travel agencies by means of such systems. Integration usually runs $1,500-5,000 with monthly charges of $100-400. The constraint of these systems is that they will naturally prioritize hotel’s needs over a travel agencies’, and where necessary could limit what property information is available, such as descriptions or high-quality images.
Booking. com and Expedia have large inventory and consumer brand recognition. API connectivity requires approved partner status with reduced commissions 2-3% less than direct bed bank contracts. There are often rate disparities between OTA channels. There are certain property types and geographic locations with limited traditional supply sources where OTAs continue to have the most relevance.
The best margins come from negotiated relationships with individual hotels or chains in 15-25% commission, versus 8-12% on aggregators. But these require a lot of manual management: you negotiate contracts one-by-one, update rates manually in your system, and confirmations tend to come via email instead of an API.
At most agencies, direct contracts are reserved for the top 20-30 properties by volume, as this is when you start seeing enough margin improvements from manual overhead. A Caribbean-focused travel boutique has 40 direct contracts with luxury resorts, with margins that are 35 per cent higher than through aggregators. But they do have one person half-time just managing those relationships and rate updates.
The cornerstone to control several hotels suppliers is eliminating delays in the confirmation of communication. Inventory amounts for Suppliers B, C, and D should be blocked in the system as soon as a booking is received on Supplier A.
It’s platforms such as Gimmonix that enable this synchronization to happen. Real-time Sync API eliminates the booking conflicts by around 80% as stated in Gimmonix’s documentation on hotel supplier connectivity found at https://gimmonix.com/articles/hotel-supplier-connectivity/
Implementation costs:
– Small agencies (2-3 suppliers): $3,000-$8,000 upfront, and $300-$600/month
– Medium agencies (4-7 suppliers): $8,000-$15,000 upfront, and $600-$1,200/month
– Large agencies (8+ suppliers): $15,000-$30,000 upfront & $1,200-2,500/month
Return on investment (ROI) timeline: The majority of agencies see an ROI for integration within 6-9 months in the form of labor savings and decreased booking conflicts.
Test requirements: Plan 100+ test bookings across all suppliers before going live. Testing will include standard, cancellations, updates, edges (sold out property / rates changed during booking), and timeouts in APIs.
The same hotel room often is quoted as having different prices on suppliers. Automating rate parity monitoring will protect you from losing your commission.
One agency found its back up bed bank consistently showed an 8-12% higher rate on the same properties. They discovered that after they did a little research, their contract tier was outdated. Renegotiation recovered commissions could save in the order of $28,000 each year.
Do not randomly distribute bookings among suppliers. Formulate conscious allocation plans that suit your agency’s size and niche.
Monitor these metrics weekly. Performance discussions should be had with suppliers who fall short time and again. Report performance issues with data: “In Q3, Supplier B’s confirmation time was on average 42 min, above our target of 15 min in 68% of bookings.”
When confirmations are not yet received, your staff could be liable for accepting backup bookings with multiple suppliers. Today’s booking platforms already solve this problem with centralized confirmation tracking where suppliers are sending the confirmations for all products and receive / send back the responses through a single interface.
This single strategy cuts confirmation lag by hours to minutes. Once one supplier confirms the booking, all other connected suppliers will have their status updated in real-time so that duplication of booking can never happen. Many solutions will provide this level of Business Rules functionality, costing between $5k and 20k depending on the complexity and number of suppliers.
The most important one is operational: your teams see a single passive confirmation dashboard, rather than monitoring six different supplier portals. Our agencies see 70-80% less time required to track confirmations and far fewer booking conflicts.
A Colorado-headquartered adventure travel company had only one bed bank accounting for 92% of their hotel reservations. When that supplier suffered a 14-hour outage during the high summer booking season, the agency was unable to process any hotel reservations. They lost about $45,000 in bookings that day; 30 percent of those who canceled ending up booking with a competitor.
Solution: Cultivate at least three suppliers, even if backup suppliers account for only 10-15% of volume. Quarterly, test backup supplier workflows for expedited switching should your team need to do so in an outage.
Poor quality vendors are enjoying the free ride of not having to be held accountable. One Texas agency saw the average confirmation time for its top provider creeping from 8 minutes to 38 minutes over an 18-month period. It happened so subtly that no one saw it, but customer satisfaction scores dropped from 4.6 stars to just 3.8. Satisfaction returned to 4.5 stars within two months of switching to a faster supplier.
Solution: Introduce monthly scorecards measuring, at least, confirmation time; availability of accuracy and support responsiveness. Have a quarterly business review and performance meetings with the best suppliers.
A California agency that focuses on international travel was unaware its leading supplier had soft inventory in Eastern Europe. They had been forced for two years to answer “limited availability” in response to potential customers in Prague, Budapest and Krakow a loss of an estimated 150 bookings a year. And once they added a supplier strong in Eastern Europe, those bookings happened right away, and they paid another $180,000 of annual revenues.
Solution: Complete quarterly inventories audit for your top 50 destinations. Look for a hotel you know is there. If you don’t find it with Supplier A, then next test Supplier B and C. Map where suppliers have the best coverage in which regions. Pass this information onto your booking agents.
A boutique agency invested 12 hours every Monday manually entering prices from supplier portals into their booking system. At $30/hour, that comes out to about $18,720 per year. Utilizing automated rate feeds (a $4,800 annual price), they repurposed that staff time for customer service, resulting in faster response times and $35,000 in additional bookings from better service.
Solution: Without full automation, you can still eliminate manual effort by using: RSS feeds from supplier portals, scheduled windows for rate updates (daily vs. continuous updating), Use of high-volume properties to drive more frequent update schedules, Willingness to accept some degree of rate stale data at low volume properties
During a significant provider outage affecting thousands of agencies, one agency transitioned to their backup provider within 30 minutes as they kept the backup credentials in an easily accessible location; trained staff on the process for shifting to backups; pre-configured API access keys with the secondary system; and performed failover tests every quarter.
The other company across the street took 6 hours to switch over to backup systems because they had never tested it. They also lost a day in business in bookings.
Solution: Document contingency procedures. Test quarterly. Time for your failover process. Train all the staff, not just technical leads.
Document all suppliers in detail:
Measure current state: “Our existing multi-supplier coordination costs us $4,200 in staff time every month and we deal with 8-12 booking conflicts every month. We have an effective commission rate of 9.2% across all bookings.”
Evaluate 3-5 integration platforms.
Key evaluation criteria:
1. How compatible are your suppliers with the supplier management solution?
2. Deployment time frame (some of these platforms are 2 weeks, others are 3 months)
3. Pricing (setup fees / monthly fees/ per transaction fees)
4. Quality of support staff (24/7? Business hours only? Response time SLAs?
5. Scalability (can you take on additional suppliers later without completely reimplementing?)
Ask for demos WITH your real supplier list. Integration gaps are not exposed to generic demos.
Phased rollout mitigates risk:
Enabling agencies to manage many hotel suppliers effectively is the key function of TMCs and solves the core operational problems encountered by travel agents. Bringing disparities in your rates, eliminating conflicts and automating coordination all contribute directly to the bottom line.
Begin by evaluating what you are currently spending on supplier management. The agencies that thrive on multi-provider strategies have a few things in common: they have measured the baseline performance, implemented solutions piecemeal rather than trying to transform everything overnight, re-trained staff on new systems and continuously optimized as data has come through.
It is not an inconsiderable investment, but it is one worth making. The average middle size agency invests $15–25K in the setting up full–scale supplier management solutions. They pay for this investment within 6-12 months via saved labor, fewer booking clashes, and cash optimization. And, more importantly, they develop operational leverages to grow without corresponding increases in headcounts.
Effectively managing multiple hotel suppliers is more than a profit driver it impacts customer satisfaction. These approaches are proven to reduce costs, increase operational performance, and deliver durable competitive differentiation. For firms that are prepared to pursue these approaches, assess which platforms are right for you given your supplier mix, budget, and technical capabilities.
Choose suppliers based on your specialization (corporate = GDS systems like Sabre; leisure = bed banks like Hotelbeds), regional coverage (Hotelbeds dominates Asia/Europe, Web Beds strong in Caribbean), and commission structure (GDS: 0-5%, Bed banks: 8-15%, Direct: 15-25%). Test 10-20 bookings with each supplier before committing, checking confirmation speed (<15 min), reliability, and rate accuracy. Most successful agencies maintain 3-5 suppliers to prevent over-reliance and ensure regional coverage.
Multiple suppliers fill inventory gaps (preventing $180K+ lost bookings), recover hidden commission ($25-50K/year), provide business continuity during outages (preventing $45K+ losses), enable faster confirmations (5-15 min vs. 30-60 min), and give negotiating leverage. Agencies report $20-40K annual value from +0.5-1.5% commission improvement, 40-60 hours/week labor savings, and reduced booking conflicts.
Use three tiers: automated monitoring tools ($200-800/month, catches 95%), manual spot-checking ($0, catches 60-70%), and direct supplier communication. Rate differences are normal due to different commission structures. By identifying best-rate suppliers per property type, improve effective commission by 0.5-1.5% ($2,500-7,500/year).
Integration platforms like Gimmonix ($300-2,500/month) reduce confirmations from 30-60 minutes to 5-15 minutes while preventing overbooking. Break-even in 6-9 months through labor savings and conflict reduction. Verify platform supports YOUR suppliers, offers 24/7 support, maintains 99.5%+ uptime, and scales with growth.
Use three layers: real-time sync (confirm on Supplier A, auto-marks sold on B, C, D within 30 sec), verification process (1-min, 5-min, 30-min checks), and contingency response (rebook within 1 hour). This reduces conflicts from 1-2% to <0.2%, saving $9,600-57,600 annually.
Travel Automation Expert
