If two of my suppliers sell the same hotel, will it show up twice on my website?

It can, and this is one of the first things agents notice once they connect more than one hotel supplier. Every supplier keeps its own code and its own spelling for a property, so the same hotel can arrive twice, under two different ids, with two different descriptions. A hotel booking API deals with this using what is usually called hotel mapping, which compares the name, the address and the map position of each property and joins the matching ones into a single listing.

When the mapping is working, your customer sees one hotel with one set of photos, and the rooms from both suppliers sit together underneath it, normally with the cheaper option shown first. That is worth having, because the very same room often comes at a different rate from each supplier, and you can decide whether to keep that difference as your margin or pass the saving to your customer.

It is only fair to say that matching is never perfect. Hotels with similar names on the same street, serviced apartments and small guest houses are the usual trouble, so now and then a property slips through as a duplicate, or two neighbouring hotels get merged when they should not be. How much of this you see depends on the suppliers you are connected to and on the plan you are on, and most systems let you correct a mapping by hand once you have spotted it.

The simplest way to judge it is to search a city you know well with all your suppliers switched on, and look down the first page of results to see whether anything appears twice.