CruiseHub: What a Booking Agency Sells When the Price Is the Same

CruiseHub is a North American travel agency founded in Montreal with operations in Canada and the United States. Its proposition is a useful case study for any business reselling a product its supplier also sells directly.

Location, Stated Plainly

CruiseHub is a North American cruise agency founded in Montreal in 2023. It operates in both Canada and the United States, with entities in Montreal, Quebec and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where it opened an office in 2025. It publishes a Florida Seller of Travel registration number, describes itself as an accredited travel agency and is a member of the Cruise Lines International Association.

The company was originally incubated within Momentum Ventures, the Montreal-based group behind FlightHub and JustFly, whose early financial backing and operational support helped get the business off the ground. In 2025, CruiseHub became a fully independent company under founder Marcus Tomiuk, and Momentum remains a close friend of the business.

It is included here because the commercial problem it solves is one a great many other Canadian resellers, dealers and agencies face directly.

Adding Value Alongside Your Supplier

A cruise line sells directly through its own website. So does every airline, hotel group and increasingly every manufacturer. Any agency reselling those products is competing against the supplier whose inventory it depends on, and it cannot usually win on price, because the supplier sets it.

CruiseHub’s answer is to treat the cruise lines as partners rather than competitors, and to compete on everything the direct channel does not offer. The cruise lines actively support the agency’s group space, which often allows it to offer pricing below what a guest would find booking direct, and they provide bonus perks such as onboard credit and amenity packages for CruiseHub guests. On top of that, the company charges no booking fees, offers a price match against lower advertised fares and provides advisors available at all hours. Its own framing is direct: same ship, same cabin, more for your money.

That is the correct strategic answer for a reseller. If the price alone will not win, the transaction has to be worth more, and the supplier has to see value in the relationship too. What the cruise lines get from CruiseHub is exceptional service and long-term relationship building that keeps guests cruising. For Canadian dealers, agencies and distributors facing manufacturer direct sales, the same logic applies, and the Excell and Mastercom articles elsewhere in this batch describe versions of it in telecommunications.

“The cruise lines aren’t our competitors, they’re our closest partners. Through our partnerships we can often beat the price of booking direct, but price is only part of it. What we really offer is a real person who knows the ships, looks after you when plans change, and is still there for your next cruise. That’s the value the cruise lines trust us to deliver to their guests.”

Marcus Tomiuk, Founder and CEO, CruiseHub

Where the Value Actually Sits

Three elements of the offering are worth noting as examples rather than endorsements.

Round-the-clock human support addresses the specific weakness of direct online booking. A traveller whose flight is cancelled the day before a sailing, or who needs to change a booking at an awkward hour, discovers quickly what a self-service booking does not include.

Group bookings are the clearest commercial niche. The company runs fourteen categories of group cruise, from weddings and family reunions to corporate and club travel, and group arrangements involve negotiated rates, allocated cabins, amenity packages and coordination that a booking website is simply not built to handle.

The content operation is the third. The site publishes port guides, destination pages, price indexes and planning resources in considerable depth. Content of that volume is expensive to produce and is how an agency reaches travellers who begin with a search rather than a supplier in mind.

The Transferable Lesson

For Canadian business owners reselling anything, the question CruiseHub answers explicitly is worth asking about your own business: if a customer can buy the identical product directly from the manufacturer at the same price, or close to it, what exactly are they buying from you?

Acceptable answers include expertise that saves them from a wrong choice, service when something fails, access to terms they could not negotiate alone, and the removal of work they do not want to do. Unacceptable answers include convenience the supplier now matches, and a relationship the customer has not needed in years.

The businesses that struggle in this position are usually the ones that never had to answer the question, because the supplier did not sell directly. That has changed in most industries, and it is worth having the answer ready before a customer asks it.

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Disclaimer: This article is based on publicly available information intended only for informational purposes. CanadianSME Small Business Magazine does not endorse or guarantee any products or services mentioned. Readers are advised to conduct their research and due diligence before making business decisions.