Hotel wholesalers will decline or disappear over time and suppliers who thought they were beginning to get control of the distribution channel need to think again according to Glenn Fogel, executive vice president of corporate development of the world's largest online hotel seller, Priceline.

Speaking at the Travel Distribution Summit in Beijing last week, Fogel, whose company sold almost 80 million room nights for the four quarters that ended in June and has a market capitalization of US$15 billion, said that the wholesaler model (he named GTA as an example) made less sense in today's rate-transparent world.

"The wholesaler buys rooms from a hotel at a low price and resells them to an OTA who doesn't have a relationship with the hotel and takes 25% or 35% and sometimes a lot more out of the total cost of the room."

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