Homegrown Canadian Tour Operator WingBuddy Puts Strong Emphasis on B2B Sales

There’s no escaping the travel industry. 

WingBuddy founder Chris Hakim grew up in his mother’s Montreal travel agency Voyages Routair, which has been in business more than 40 years. During his 20s, Hakim left the business to explore other options, but by 2008 he returned with a clear goal: to bring in new tools, modern booking platforms, and fresh ideas.

“In the early 2000s, Expedia made it easy to do online flight booking,” Hakim told Travel Market Report Canada. “By 2013 flights were easy to book, along with hotels, car rentals and to some extent cruises. But experiential travel, that was still very behind and we strived to create an optimal operation leveraging technology.”

A passionate creator and entrepreneur, Hakim said he saw a gap in the marketplace for easy-to-book, experience-rich, multi-stop trips. While simple itineraries had become easier to book online, cultural tours and organized itineraries were still fragmented, expensive, and stressful to arrange.

Hakim describes the company’s ‘Why’ this way: “To make travel easy and enriching by offering hassle-free, expertly designed trips at exclusive rates. We handle every detail from flights and transfers to accommodations and experiences so travellers can focus entirely on discovery and connection.”

Today, WingBuddy offers over 200 air-inclusive packages that span the globe.

WingBuddy took flight in 2013 after a couple of years of planning, all from a single desk in his mother’s agency.

With no external financing, the company was built from the ground up. “The first years were very difficult,” Hakim said, “but growth accelerated from 2017 to 2020.”

We all know what happened then, but Hakim and his small team remained undaunted. “We worked as if it would come back, focusing on the product line and technology. Many competitors thought travel wouldn’t have a strong comeback, but following the pandemic we have had triple-digit growth.”

In business for 12 years now, Hakim is proud of the success of his vision. “We have helped well over 100,000 travellers explore the world while staying true to our founding vision: delivering rich, hassle-free travel experiences that connect people and cultures.”

Hakim says the difference between WingBuddy and ‘marketplaces’ such as Tour Radar, is that WingBuddy builds and carries its own products, rather than acting as an intermediary.

WingBuddy’s product line is divided into simple categories:

• Organized Tours with guided experiences and seamless logistics.
• Semi-Organized Tours blending structure with flexibility.
• Freedom Tours for independent travelers who still want simplicity.
• All-Inclusive River Cruises that bring you directly to the heart of charming villages and historic cities.
• All-Inclusive Ocean Cruises that blend comfort with curated itineraries to iconic global destinations.

Every package includes flights, transfers, accommodations and inter-city transport, tailored to match the style of the traveller.

“Creating our own turnkey experiences – exceptional, hassle-free, that’s our obsession,” Hakim said.

Customer service and quality of experience are at the forefront of the WingBuddy offering, Hakim told Travel Market Report Canada.

“We obsess on client satisfaction. We operate as both a start-up and a family business and create the best possible environment for our team members. We are continuously developing the right number of packages for each destination, emphasizing diversity and simplicity, curated and focused packages.”

Hakim says the initial focus for WingBuddy was B2C and most packages today are sold direct to consumers attracted by WingBuddy consumer advertising. But the company has always had relationships with travel agencies and is now focused on building that channel.

“We want to build these relationships. We believe the industry needs this. So we decided to push harder with B2B and made the decision to do it well. We empower travel consultants with turnkey products that are easy to sell and deliver,” Hakim said.

“Right now agent bookings are more costly for us than B2C, because we drive the sale through consumer advertising, but we think that will change as travel agents begin promoting us more. For advisors to create tailor-made FIT packages it is very time consuming, and often the sale doesn’t go through. With our curated packages travellers can get what they want without going full DIY.”

Customization is possible with WingBuddy packages, specifically with pre- and post-package hotel nights and flight deviations the most common. As well, a little over half of WingBuddy’s packages offers Classic or Superior hotel choices.

Ocean and river cruise packages – a growing part of the business – offer a choice of up to three accommodation categories.

“We want to continuously deliver as we grow,” said Hakim. “It’s the most important priority. We now have close to 80 people working for WingBuddy, and our driving obsession is to keep our clients happy and keep our team happy.”

The WingBuddy founder cites the following reasons why the concept works and offers value and opportunity to Canadian travel advisors:

Scale meets care: We combine the experience of handling high traveller volumes with personalized service and attention to detail.

Exclusive rates and value: Our group booking power and strong supplier relationships unlock pricing that individual travelers rarely find on their own.

End-to-end ease: Flights, transfers, accommodations, and curated itineraries are seamlessly bundled into a single, hassle-free booking.

Customer experience as our compass: We measure success through loyalty, repeat travellers, and NPS, using feedback to improve every trip we offer.