Originally Posted by
breakthrough37
I tried the website a couple of weeks ago. I was on a cruise about a year ago and someone mention the site. I wanted to book a cruise later in the year. I submitted the information to Cruise Compete. I received several quotes some were straight forward and the prices were in the same range of the cabin requested. Others listed different cabins with higher and lower price with and without perks. I was not familiar with most of the agencies. Some were small agencies with limited inventory and other had slightly larger inventories but not like the major cruise agencies like Vacations to Go, Online Vacation Center and Cruise Line.com. Cruise Critic is a good site to use when looking for a cruise.
By "inventory" do you mean available cabins? They should all have access to the same cabins. Now, it's possible that if they have a group, they only have the discounted rate left on specific categories.
The quotes I've seen have typically been from the places you mentioned, plus Cruiseone, which is a franchise operation and the company that responds will be (in my experience) just a one person operation. That's actually who my current agent is with, and I found her with Cruisecompete. She's not always as cheap as places like Crucon, but she responds quickly to email I send at 10pm (or later).
My only disappointment came recently, when I asked for a quote or an Oceania cruise and only got one response. Apparently they had that cruise (and maybe all Oceania?) set up to go to a single agent. The price wasn't even all that great.
Cruise Critic is an excellent resource, but not for finding travel agents as their policy says you cannot mention them.