Hotelbeds is squeezed. Its fix runs through your contract.
The company now keeps €7.30 of every €100 booked through it, down from €9 at its listing. Its answer is to sell more rooms through OTAs — and more rooms it never contracted at all.
by Markus Busch
The squeeze. Somebody in your revenue office loaded a discounted static rate for Hotelbeds months ago and hasn't thought about it since. On the other end of that contract, HBX Group — Hotelbeds' parent, and the largest independent hotel wholesaler in the world — published a trading update in July. Of every €100 booked through it in the quarter to June, it kept €7.30. The prospectus it listed on in Madrid in February 2025 was built on €9. It has fallen in most quarters since, and this is the lowest yet. Your discount was priced for a wholesaler whose business was its own hotel contracts. That is no longer quite the business.
The fix. HBX has the bookings. Volume is still growing (about 14 percent this year), which makes the disclosure sharper: growth is no longer paying what it used to, and the company has said where it goes to compensate. The OTA channel rose from 25 to 27 percent of its volume in a year. Third-party supply — rooms HBX sources from other suppliers rather than contracting hotels itself — rose from 14 to 17 percent and is heading, by its own account, toward 20. One room in five it sells will not come from its own deal with a hotel. Management calls the shift deliberate; the CFO called this year's approach "tough medicine." Both channels pay HBX less per booking than its core business. It is trading its cut for volume, through the doors that leak.
What your contract bought. The static discounted rate was the price of admission to a closed system. Opaque packaging. A wholesaler selling supply it had contracted itself, to downstream buyers it could name. HBX's own numbers now describe a different company: more of the volume flowing to OTA storefronts, where your wholesale discount trades in sight of your public rate, and a sourcing operation that can fill demand from other wholesalers when your rate doesn't win. Asked by Skift whether 7.3 percent is a floor, HBX said it does not manage the business to one.
The catch. The mix figures are HBX's own, from its trading update and investor materials. Contract terms between wholesaler and hotel are private, so whether this is already reaching individual properties — a pushed rate, a tightened allocation — is not visible from the outside. And HBX attributes roughly three points of its lost growth this year to the Middle East conflict (its own estimate). The squeeze is documented. What a squeezed wholesaler does to any one hotel's terms is not — yet.
The listing priced the moat. HBX came to market eighteen months ago valued near €2.8 billion, on the argument that contracted hotel supply at scale protects a wholesaler's economics. Its own reporting now prices that argument at €7.30 per €100 and falling. The fix it chose lands at your renewal: a wholesaler that sells more through OTAs, and sources more rooms from everywhere else, is a wholesaler that needs your contract a little less each quarter — and asks you to hold your side of it all the same.
Read also: Your wholesale contract still works. That's the problem. · HBX put 250,000 hotels into Sabre. It didn't need to ask any of them.
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