Can I get the full list of hotels in a city from the API so I know what my website can actually sell?

Yes, in most cases you can get a list of the hotels available to you. Hotel booking APIs usually provide a separate content feed, sometimes called a static file, holding the hotel names, addresses, cities, star ratings and descriptions for everything the supplier carries. It is meant to be downloaded once and refreshed now and then, rather than called every time a customer searches, because it is a very large amount of information.

What you receive depends on the supplier and on your plan. Some suppliers hand over their whole list openly, some give you only the hotels in the countries you are contracted for, and a few release the full file on request. If you are connected to more than one supplier, each of them names and numbers the same hotel differently, so the lists have to be matched up before they can be shown as one clean set on your website.

It is worth being clear that a hotel appearing on that list does not mean it has rooms for your customer's dates. The list tells you what the supplier can sell in principle. Only a live search tells you what is actually free and what it costs, so the two do different jobs, the list for building pages and letting people browse, the live search for quoting and booking.

If you want to use the list for your own destination pages or as a reference for your staff, let us know which suppliers you are connected to and what you plan to do with it, and we can confirm what each one allows and how often the file should be refreshed.