Do I need my own contracts with airlines and hotels to sell on my white label travel portal?

No, you do not usually need your own contracts with airlines and hotels to start selling. Most white label travel portals arrive connected to suppliers who already hold those agreements, so you can search, book and issue from their inventory once your portal goes live. That is the main reason a small agency can open a booking website without first spending months negotiating with carriers and hotel groups.

What you do need is an account of your own with the portal provider and, in most markets, whatever licence or registration your local rules ask of a travel seller. Depending on the plan, you also need a way to pay for the bookings, either by keeping a balance with the supplier or by passing the customer payment through at the time of booking. Those conditions come from the supplier and from the market you sell in, not from the website itself, so they can differ from one country to another.

If you do already hold contracts of your own, whether a rate agreement with a hotel or your own airline arrangement, these can often be added alongside the standard suppliers so that your own rates appear in the same search results. Whether that is possible depends on the supplier being connectable and on the plan you choose, so it is much better to raise it before you sign than afterwards.

Make a short list of the suppliers and private rates you want to sell, and ask which of them are already available on the portal and which would need a separate connection setting up.