Do I need my own contracts with hotels to use your hotel booking API, or do you supply the hotels?

No, you do not need your own hotel contracts to start selling through a hotel booking API. The usual arrangement is that the connection arrives with hotel inventory already attached, so you can search, quote and book from the first day without speaking to a single property yourself. For most agencies this is the main reason to use an API at all, because negotiating with hotels one by one is slow work and only really pays off in places where you have a strong local presence.

That said, some suppliers sitting behind that inventory do ask you to hold your own agreement or credentials with them. Where that applies, we connect the API to your account rather than supplying the rooms ourselves, and the commercial terms, including how you are billed and how your commission is paid, stay between you and that supplier. Which ones work this way depends on the markets you sell into and the plan you take, so please ask rather than assuming everything is covered.

If you already have direct deals with hotels in your own city or region, those can normally be loaded alongside the API inventory so your customers see both in one set of results. How much control you get over those rates, and whether your team can update availability without help, depends on the setup you choose.

The simplest next step is to send us the destinations you sell most often, and we will tell you plainly which hotels would come with the connection and which would need an agreement in your own name.