Best way to use a custom table in a relationship?

Hello again guys.

So, I’m a bit on how to use a separate table in a relationship, or something like that…

Anyhow, lets say that I have a table with around 5000 hotels (lets say that it is called exp_h_hotels). On my website, I use the pages module to create a static subpage for each part of the country. Now, I want to somehow list all the hotels that belong to a specific region.

Now – I have understod that I can’t do something like this (using ExpressionEngine tags with the query module):

{exp:query sql="SELECT * FROM exp_h_hotels WHERE h_regionname ='{regionname}'"}
       {hotel_name}
{/exp:query}

Anyone knows the best way to go forward with this?

I have looked into using the ExpressionEngine API to insert the data into a channel – however, I get the feeling that it wouldn’t be optimal to flood the channel entries table with 5000 posts with 14-20 fields with data each.