Hotel inventory reaches the market through OTAs, which sell directly to consumers, and GDSs, the booking networks used by travel agencies and corporate travel. A third channel is wholesale — the “bed bank” — which buys hotel rooms at net (wholesale) rates and distributes them to travel agencies overseas. According to an interview with Rakuten Travel Xchange (Rakuten Group’s Singapore-based accommodation wholesaler) published by Travel Voice on September 28, 2026, the company’s inventory covers 500,000 properties and 200,000 vacation rentals, 20,000 of them under direct contract, and it sells into 200 countries. Using these figures as a starting point, this article explains how wholesale works compared with OTAs and GDSs, and reads the issues a property faces when wholesaling its rooms — rate parity, inventory allocation and content delivery — as room to expand overseas sales. We also test the interview’s claim that gross merchandise sales (GMS) for luxury hotels grew about 80% year on year against the YoY change in estimated settled ADR for 4,816 upper-tier (Luxury / High-grade) properties tracked by MetroEngines Research.

What Is Wholesale (a Bed Bank)? — Property → Wholesaler → Travel Agency → Traveler

Wholesale is a model in which a property supplies rooms to a wholesaler at a “net rate” (wholesale price); the wholesaler distributes them to sellers worldwide — travel agencies, tour operators, small OTAs — and those sellers add their own margin (markup) before selling to travelers. Wholesalers that specialize in accommodation inventory are called “bed banks” in English, and Hotel Tech Report defines them as a “B2B hotel distribution market that connects accommodation providers with travel sellers who need inventory.” In other words, while OTAs sell to travelers (B2C), a bed bank’s customers are businesses such as travel agencies (B2B). From the property’s perspective, it is a channel that “reaches many overseas travel agencies through a single contract.”

Note that in Japan’s travel industry, “wholesaler” usually refers to companies that design packaged tours and wholesale them to travel agencies. This article deals with wholesale in the international sense — the B2B distribution of accommodation inventory itself (bed banks). Among the global majors, Hotelbeds (HBX Group) states on its website that it works with “around 60,000 travel sellers in more than 170 countries” and makes clear it is a pure B2B player.

The three channels — OTA, GDS and wholesale — differ not only in “who they sell to” but also in rate structure, who sets the displayed price, cancellation terms and payment flow. The table below summarizes the differences that matter in a property’s day-to-day operations.

Source: Compiled by HotelBank Editorial Team from the House of Representatives “Written Question on Travel Agency Referral Commissions” (190th Diet, Question No. 270, May 11, 2016), Hotel Tech Report “Hotel Bed Banks,” and Travel Voice (September 28, 2026)

Published figures on commission rates are scarce. A written question submitted to the House of Representatives in May 2016 states that “referral commissions to hotels and ryokan are around 10% of room charges for domestic OTAs and around 15 to 25% for overseas inbound referral,” but this is the level presented as the questioner’s own understanding, not the result of a government survey. Meanwhile, the Japan Ryokan & Hotel Association’s “FY2025 Operating Status Statistical Survey” (published December 5, 2025; 151 valid responses) reports that the ratio of operating expenses combining sales promotion, advertising and sales commissions averaged 12.9%, up 1.3 points from the previous year, and that 46.9% of bookings came via OTAs and 30.1% via travel agencies. With roughly 80% of guests arriving through external channels — OTAs and travel agencies — understanding the rate structure of each channel is a prerequisite for rate design.

Rakuten Travel Xchange: Scale and Three Business Lines

Rakuten Travel Xchange is Rakuten Group’s accommodation wholesale and travel-tech business, which Rakuten announced it had launched out of Singapore on May 1, 2020. The announcement at the time described it as “a distribution service that lets travel retailers access hotel rates and inventory through a single API connection or portal,” and in April 2026 James Park moved from COO to CEO. The scale of the business described in the Travel Voice interview is as follows.

Source: Compiled by HotelBank Editorial Team from Travel Voice (September 28, 2026), Rakuten “Rakuten Launches Rakuten Travel Xchange” (May 1, 2020) and TTG Asia (June 5, 2026)

A June 2026 TTG Asia article reported that gross merchandise sales in January–March 2026 grew 8.1% YoY domestically and 69.7% globally, showing that the company’s growth is centered on overseas sales. As inbound context, Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO) estimates show cumulative international arrivals of 27,626,300 for January–August 2026, down 2.7% YoY, with August alone at 3,098,900, down 9.6%. While China plunged 59.0% in August, South Korea rose 28.7% to become the largest market, and Italy and Spain set records for the month of August. Park’s view is that because travelers from Europe, North America and Australia stay longer, total length of stay and room nights may be well above the previous year even as visitor numbers fall.

It is important to note that the 80% GMS growth is growth in “luxury-hotel sales booked through the wholesaler” — it does not mean that rates at Japanese luxury hotels rose 80%. If the volume flowing through the wholesale channel grows, GMS can rise even with flat rates. We check how rates actually moved using our own data below.

Issues for Properties — Reading Rate Parity, Allocation and Content Delivery as Room to Expand Overseas Sales

When a property releases inventory to wholesale, three practical issues arise. Rather than debating whether to wholesale at all, we frame each in terms of how to design it so that overseas sales reach further.

First, rate parity. In wholesale, the property hands over inventory at a net rate and the wholesaler or agency sets the selling price. As a result, the final price — net rate plus markup — can end up displayed below the price on the property’s own website or public OTA listings. Hotel Tech Report cites cases where net rates leak onto small OTAs or metasearch and undercut the property’s own prices, and recommends “hiding special rates so that only travel agents, tour operators and the like can access them,” along with contractually restricting resale outlets. In our own measurement of 9,030 listed-price pairs under identical conditions, OTA Price Gaps: 71% Identical Across 9,030 Matched Pairs, about 70% of pairs across two booking channels showed a ¥0 gap. Properties that already keep public channels in parity can, by pinning down through contracts and regular price monitoring “where and at what price” wholesale-sourced rates appear, open up room to sell to a customer base they have not yet reached — overseas travel agencies.

Second, inventory allocation (allotment). Our analysis (OTAs Get 51.8% of Rooms at 11,152 Hotels) found that the median property lists about half of its total rooms on booking sites, with the rest directed to phone, the property’s own website, travel agencies and groups. Wholesale comes in two forms — a fixed allotment, or inventory linked to public availability — and the choice changes how a property sells in peak periods. Fixed allotments fit more easily into overseas agencies’ package building, while linked inventory makes it easier for the property to retain inventory control. As shown in our analysis of allocation rates when the Kyushu recovery travel subsidy opened on booking sites 8 days before travel agencies, when and how much inventory to open per channel is a variable that determines both rate and occupancy. Designing the wholesale allotment as “a block that fills weekday and off-season inventory first for long-stay overseas guests” adds a channel without competing with existing ones.

Third, content delivery. In the interview, concern over “whether content will be conveyed accurately” was cited as a reason ryokan hesitate to open their inventory worldwide. Meals (the kaiseki menu, in-room dining or a dining hall), the bathing tax (in many municipalities a standard rate of ¥150 per person per day, collected separately from the room charge), yukata and loungewear, check-in time, large-bath hours and conditions for children sharing a bed are easily omitted on overseas agencies’ screens. The Japan Ryokan & Hotel Association survey found that 97.3% of ryokan accept online bookings both on their own website and via OTAs, and many ryokan already have detailed descriptions for domestic guests. Rakuten Travel Xchange’s AI-based multilingual processing — which “assesses the importance of long descriptions before translating them, cutting time by 90%” — is a way to carry those domestic description assets straight onto overseas sales screens, giving ryokan room to “expand without rewriting.” What a property can prepare is to place “meal format, separate bathing tax and check-in time” in fixed positions within plan names and descriptions, so that nothing drops out whichever channel the content flows through.

Upper-Tier Estimated Settled ADR YoY — Nationwide Aggregate of 4,816 Luxury / High-Grade Properties

Behind the 80% GMS growth, how did rates at Japan’s upper-tier properties move? From properties classified as “Luxury” or “High-grade” under MetroEngines Research’s grade classification, we took the 5,563 ryokan, resort, city and business properties as the population and, for the 4,816 properties for which an estimated settled ADR could be calculated (2,837 Luxury, 1,979 High-grade), aggregated the monthly median and the median YoY change versus the same month of the previous year at the same property (same-property basis). Note that the grade classification is our own category based on facilities and ratings, not a price band, and that the estimated settled ADR is a tax-exclusive-equivalent estimate obtained by applying a property-type correction factor to the lowest-plan price. Because October 2026 figures are estimates based on listed prices at the time of the survey, we limited the analysis to September, the latest finalized month.

Source: Compiled by HotelBank Editorial Team from MetroEngines Research (median estimated settled ADR for the Luxury grade, monthly N=2,458–2,726 properties)

The Luxury-grade median started 2026 above the prior year at ¥29,300 in January (+6.7% same-property, N=2,528) and held at +5% or so in February–March. Growth slowed to +1–2% in April–May, then fell below the prior year for three straight summer months: ¥22,700 in June (−3.6%), ¥24,200 in July (−3.8%) and ¥27,900 in August (−2.9%). September returned to positive at ¥25,500, +2.7% (N=2,554). The High-grade tier followed the same shape, from +7.6% in January to −3.4% to −4.2% in June–August and +3.8% in September (N=1,743).

Source: Compiled by HotelBank Editorial Team from MetroEngines Research (same-property YoY by grade; “all properties” is a reference value — the property-count-weighted average of the median estimated settled ADR across 47 prefectures; September N=17,136 properties)

The all-property reference value — the property-count-weighted average of estimated settled ADR across the 47 prefectures — swung more widely than the upper tier: +12.8% in January, −4.1% to −4.6% in June–August and +4.9% in September. The upper tier grew less than the market at the start of the year, and its summer dip was shallower. Taking a simple average of same-property YoY for January–September gives +1.5% for Luxury and +1.3% for High-grade; in reality, upper-tier rates in 2026 were roughly flat to slightly up year on year. If GMS through the wholesale channel grew 80%, most of that would be explained not by rate but by volume — that is, by more properties on the wholesale channel and more bookings.

GMS growth can be roughly broken down into the product of “rate growth” and “volume (room-night) growth.” The table below back-calculates, for each combination of GMS growth and rate growth, the volume growth needed to explain the remainder. If rates rose +2.7%, matching the Luxury tier in September, volume growth accounts for about 75% of the 80% GMS increase, and the rate factor contributes just under 5% of total growth (about 4.5% on a log decomposition). Within the range of our data — rates roughly flat to slightly up (−4.0% to +5.0%) — every row implies volume growth of 70–88%, so the conclusion does not change.

Source: HotelBank Editorial Team estimates. Volume growth = (1 + GMS growth) ÷ (1 + rate growth) − 1. Rate rows reflect the actual range of MetroEngines Research estimated settled ADR (same-property basis). GMS also includes currency conversion, changes in the mix of properties handled and sellers’ markups, so volume growth is indicative only.

Splitting by property type reveals a gap between ryokan and hotels. Luxury-grade ryokan averaged +2.1% for January–September and only −0.8% for July–September, while Luxury-grade hotels (resort / city / business) averaged 0.0% for January–September and −3.1% for July–September. In August the gap widened to −1.8% for ryokan versus −6.5% for hotels. This suggests that urban hotels felt the payback from 2025 rates inflated by Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai and the exchange rate, while ryokan, with more price-supporting elements such as kaiseki dining and hot springs, saw shallower declines.

Source: Compiled by HotelBank Editorial Team from MetroEngines Research (median YoY versus the same month of the previous year at the same property; averages are simple averages of monthly YoY)

By prefecture, September upper-tier rates moved in different directions by region. Aichi rose +14.0% (N=112) as lodging demand from the Asian Games, which opened on September 19, reached the upper tier as well. Fukuoka +9.5% (N=79), Nagano +5.6% (N=273), Kanagawa +3.7% (N=199) and Okinawa +2.9% (N=127) followed. Tokyo −1.5% (N=152), Kyoto +0.3% (N=201) and Hokkaido −0.1% (N=208) were roughly flat, while Osaka fell −21.5% (N=86) as the payback from last year’s Expo-period levels continued. In August, too, the big metropolitan areas sank — Osaka −24.9%, Tokyo −9.7%, Kyoto −7.7% — while regional resorts held up, with Nagano at +1.2%.

Source: Compiled by HotelBank Editorial Team from MetroEngines Research (Luxury and High-grade tiers, September 2026 same-property YoY; N = number of properties in scope per prefecture)

Source: Compiled by HotelBank Editorial Team from MetroEngines Research (Luxury and High-grade tiers, top 10 prefectures)

This regional divergence is also consistent with how overseas travel agencies source Japanese luxury accommodation. Long-stay travelers from Europe, North America and Australia readily add regional onsen ryokan and resorts to itineraries built around the classic cities of Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka, so there is ample room for upper-tier regional ryokan to be picked up in wholesale package building. Precisely because rates are tracking flat year on year, a design that increases the number of “sellable nights” through the wholesale channel is what moves revenue.

Implications for Hotel Sales Teams and Revenue Managers

Whether to add wholesale as a channel depends on a property’s size and its existing channel mix. But in an environment where upper-tier rates in 2026 are running +1–3% YoY, with some months below the prior year in urban areas, growing revenue by pushing rates alone is difficult. The fact that GMS through wholesalers is growing sharply shows that revenue is moving on an axis separate from domestic rates — namely, “whether the property is on the shelf of overseas travel agencies.”

Three practical steps are worth taking first. One: set the net-rate level by working back from public prices on the official website and OTAs, restrict resale outlets in the wholesaler contract, and put in place regular checks of displayed selling prices. Two: design the wholesale allotment as blocks for weekdays, the off-season and minimum-stay conditions, so it does not compete with existing channels for the same dates. Three: write basic information — meal format, bathing tax, check-in time, yukata and so on — in fixed positions within plan descriptions, so that nothing is lost in translation. These preparations pay off equally for overseas OTAs and travel-agency descriptions, not just wholesale, and the sequence is a practical one to follow.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q. What is the main difference between wholesale (bed banks) and OTAs?

A. Who they sell to. OTAs sell directly to travelers, and the property pays a commission after booking. In wholesale, the property hands over inventory at a wholesale (net) rate, the wholesaler distributes it to businesses such as overseas travel agencies, and the seller sets the selling price.

Q. How do GDS and wholesale differ?

A. A GDS is a commission model: the selling price the property enters appears as is on travel agency terminals, and the property bears commissions and connection fees. Wholesale is a net-rate model: the property hands over inventory at a net rate, and the wholesaler or agency adds a markup to set the final selling price.

Q. If we wholesale, won’t rooms be sold cheaper than on our official website?

A. That can happen if net rates plus markup appear on public channels. The common practice is to contractually restrict resale to travel agencies and similar sellers and to check selling prices regularly.

Q. How big is Rakuten Travel Xchange?

A. According to the Travel Voice interview, it handles 500,000 properties and 200,000 vacation rentals, with 20,000 under direct contract, selling into 200 countries. Its three business lines are API distribution, a portal for small travel agencies and white-label websites.

Q. Are luxury hotel rates really rising?

A. Based on MetroEngines Research’s estimated settled ADR, the Luxury grade was up +2.7% same-property in September 2026 and +1.5% on average for January–September. The 80% GMS growth through the wholesaler is at a level explained more by volume growth than by rates.

Summary

Wholesale (bed banks) is a channel in which a property hands over inventory at a wholesale rate and the wholesaler distributes it to overseas travel agencies; it differs from OTAs and GDSs in rate structure, who sets the displayed price, cancellation terms and payment flow. Rakuten Group’s Rakuten Travel Xchange, with 500,000 properties, 20,000 direct contracts and buyers in 200 countries, built on three businesses — API distribution, a travel agent portal and white-label sites — says it grew luxury-hotel GMS about 80% year on year. Our data, by contrast, show the estimated settled ADR of 4,816 upper-tier properties up +2.7% same-property in September 2026 and +1.5% on average for January–September — essentially flat. The GMS growth is most naturally read as the result of wider distribution, and for properties, getting rate parity, inventory allocation and content delivery right is the room to expand overseas sales without relying on rate increases.