Today’s hotel distribution environment demands more than what a legacy GDS can deliver. Travelers expect rich content, transparent pricing, personalized offers, and a seamless booking experience.
NB: This is an article from DerbySoft
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter and stay up to date
Distributors want to differentiate, manage rate plans in real time, and present the right offer to the right customer at the right time. And suppliers want to protect their commercial interests while broadening reach. This has led to the rise of multi-sourcing – pulling rates, content, and inventory from multiple channels: GDS, direct APIs, wholesalers, aggregators, and others.
Done right, it’s a powerful way to offer more choice and better pricing. Done poorly, it creates operational headaches, erodes margins, and undermines commercial agreements.
Why Multi-Sourcing Exists and Why It’s Complicated
GDSs still play a role, but they carry constraints that multi-sourcing was designed to overcome. Rich content is difficult to display on a GDS. Room descriptions are short, fields are rigid, and amenities often go unmentioned. Hotels can’t always highlight key differentiators such as whether they’re adult-only, all-inclusive, or wellness-focused. Distributors end up showing vague descriptions to travelers, creating friction at the point of decision.
Dynamic rate and inventory management is another challenge. GDSs were designed for static pricing. They’ve adapted over time, but real-time rate changes, geo-targeted promotions, and complex packages are still hard to represent accurately. That can lead to parity issues across channels and lost revenue opportunities.
Cost is also a factor. GDS participation is expensive, often pricing out smaller hotel groups and niche brands, reducing the variety available to distributors.
Multi-sourcing fixes many of these gaps – but it’s far from straightforward. Pulling from multiple sources means juggling different formats, business rules, and connection types. Hotels lose visibility over where their rates appear, distributors risk leakage to other platforms, and both sides face operational complexity that can strain relationships.
The Real World Risks of Poorly Managed Multi-Sourcing
Consider a distributor that has an agreement to prioritize a specific hotel chain. The distributor also connects to multiple wholesalers. A traveler books through the distributor’s platform, but behind the scenes, the booking gets fulfilled via a wholesaler connected to another marketplace. The booking bypasses the preferred channel entirely.
In another case, a chain distributes inventory to a distributor through multiple intermediaries. One wholesaler passes rates to a secondary marketplace, which undercuts the hotel’s direct price. Not only does the hotel lose rate parity, but its marketing investment in the preferred partnership is diluted.
