From APIs to Vibe Coding: How Nuitée Is Redefining Hotel Distribution

As hotel distribution grows more open and decentralized, infrastructure will define the winners. Nuitée is for hotel distribution what AWS is for computing or Stripe is for payments, helping hotels and new sellers unlock channels, control pricing, and personalize experiences.

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This sponsored content was created in collaboration with a Skift partner.

Hotel distribution has long been fragmented, opaque, and dominated by a few powerful intermediaries. For decades, hotels — particularly independents — have paid high commissions to online travel agencies (OTAs) and relied on systems that limited their control over inventory, pricing, and customer relationships.

But the industry is changing fast. Skift Research projects that by 2030, direct digital channels will outpace OTAs in hotel gross bookings — $409 billion versus $333 billion — signaling a seismic shift in how hotels reach travelers.

Nuitée, an API-first travel infrastructure company, is betting that its technology can accelerate this transformation. The company recently closed a $48 million Series A led by Accel to scale its API-first platform and developer ecosystem.

“The $48 million is just a validation of what we’ve been doing,” said Med Benmansour, CEO and founder. “We didn’t even seek fundraising. Tier-one VCs reached out because of the way we were approaching the problem — thinking outside the box, challenging the status quo, and putting API at the core of the product, with services built on top, just like Stripe, Twilio, or AWS.”

Founded in 2018, Nuitée has been profitable from day one, growing threefold year-over-year and surpassing $1 billion in booking volume last year. The company’s focus is clear: create an open, developer-friendly infrastructure layer for travel that eliminates inefficiencies and opens hotel distribution to a wider ecosystem of sellers.

One of the most entrenched problems in hotel distribution is data inconsistency — mismatched room names, outdated images, and duplicate listings across different platforms. This confusion erodes traveler trust and drives pricing “leakage,” where the same room appears at different rates on different channels.“When we started, hotels didn’t even control their own inventory IDs or room names,” Benmansour explained. “Content was being passed from one company to another like a game of telephone. We built our own mapping system, called Cupid, to fix that. Whether it’s hotel ID mapping, room mapping, or content enhancement, our technology gives hotels full control.”Cupid improves the traveler journey from the ground up. Nuitée has processed more than 450 million hotel images, applying AI to enhance quality, generate videos, and tailor descriptions for specific audiences. “If you’re a wedding planning app, the description can highlight nearby venues or romantic features. If you’re targeting foodies, it might focus on Michelin-starred restaurants. That’s personalization at the content level,” Benmansour said.

By unbundling the traditional OTA model into separate supply and demand platforms, Nuitée allows hotels to connect directly with distribution partners, avoiding the “bad middleman” problem of switches or channel managers who simply pass along inventory without optimizing for conversion.

A core part of Nuitée’s vision is enabling companies that aren’t traditional travel brands — such as fintechs, loyalty platforms, or even wedding apps — to offer hotel bookings through their own channels.Take Revolut, the global financial super-app with over 60 million users. Through Nuitée, Revolut can now connect directly with major hotel chains like Hilton, Accor, and Marriott — building a direct relationship that enhances the guest journey and creates mutual value. Guests arrive at the hotel knowing they booked through Revolut, making it a high-value distribution channel for both the fintech and the hotel brand.

For fintechs, embedding travel creates a new way to monetize high-retention audiences. By partnering with Nuitée, they can offer competitive prices, personalized packages, and loyalty rewards without the operational headaches of running a travel business. Hotels, in turn, gain access to customer bases they could not reach before.

High OTA commissions — often up to 30% — have long been a sore spot for hoteliers. Nuitée’s direct-connect model offers a profitable alternative. “Partners can earn up to 20% margins — well above industry averages — because we cut out unnecessary intermediaries,” Benmansour noted.

This aligns with broader industry trends. Skift Research forecasts that hoteliers will reduce their reliance on indirect channels from 53% in 2024 to just 34% by 2030. Direct connectivity not only boosts margins but also gives hotels control over pricing, availability, and promotions — and, critically, access to guest data that can drive repeat business.

Nuitée is tackling today’s distribution challenges while laying the groundwork for the next wave of travel technology.“We moved from manual processes to robotic process automation, and now to fully automated AI-driven workflows,” Benmansour said. “Things that used to take six months can now be built in less than a week.”Because Nuitée controls the infrastructure layer, it can rapidly deploy new capabilities — from AI-powered semantic search to agent-to-agent API integrations that allow software bots to transact without human intervention. This flexibility positions the platform for emerging use cases, like booking a hotel directly from an AI assistant conversation.Beyond hotels, Nuitée is expanding into complementary verticals — experiences, flights, and transfers — all available through its API. A growing marketplace of value-added services, including eSIM data packages and Uber vouchers, lets hotels and distribution partners enhance the traveler journey without additional operational complexity.

“Distribution is becoming decentralized,” Benmansour said. “It’s moving from central players to the masses — financial institutions, super-apps, AI platforms, even influencers. We’re building the infrastructure to connect them all.”

A defining feature of Nuitée’s strategy is its focus on developers. The company has built a community of more than 50,000 active developers and hosts hackathons with partners like Google to encourage experimentation and innovation.

“Before us, travel was the only major industry with no open API and no developer community,” Benmansour said. “Now, someone can plug into our MCP protocol and start building in five or ten minutes. That’s how ecosystems grow.”

Echoing this point, Nuitée’s LiteAPI was recently highlighted on Marcin AI, a YouTube channel by creator Marcin Teodoru that showcases low-code tools for developers and entrepreneurs.

By making its infrastructure accessible — and by offering modular, AI-ready tools — Nuitée hopes to spur a wave of new travel applications that expand distribution opportunities far beyond the traditional OTA model.

Nuitée is laying the groundwork for a more open and efficient era of hotel distribution. Its API-first architecture, AI-powered tools like Cupid, and focus on nontraditional distribution channels give both hotels and sellers new ways to grow revenue, control their brand, and reach untapped audiences.With its $48 million Series A funding and growing developer community, Nuitée is positioning itself as the go-to infrastructure for the next generation of travel applications.Travel is at a turning point, and Nuitée is building the rails it will run on.

To learn more about how Nuitée is transforming hotel distribution, request a demo, or start a conversation, click here.

This content was created collaboratively by Nuitée and Skift’s branded content studio, SkiftX.