Disney Cruise Line, a company that is usually pretty good at avoiding overt clumsiness, may have stubbed its toe with its recent pronouncement on noncommissionable fares or fees (NCFs), a move that has reminded agents just how arbitrary these charges are.
NCFs originated as a way for cruise lines to avoid paying commissions on taxes and fees that they paid to ports and governments. Why, cruise lines argued, should they pay commission to agents for the portion of the fare that goes straight to the tax collector at a foreign port?
The argument stuck, but it barely passed the sniff test, particularly since cruise lines were never much interested in itemizing the specific fees, taxes and other expenses that got lumped into "port charges."
Gradually, some cruise lines appear to have moved away from the fiction that these sums have anything to do with ports by calling them what agents called them: noncommissionable.
At Disney, the noncommissionable part of the fare had been, until mid-August, $20 per person per day, a nice, round number that appears to have had nothing to do with anything.
Now it's $25 on short cruises, $30 on cruises of seven to 10 days and $20 on cruises of 11 days or more. And for the agents we've heard from, it still seems to have nothing to do with anything except a desire to reduce commissions.
The irony here is that, for most agents, airlines far outrank cruise lines as the villains of travel distribution over the last quarter-century. But even in their wildest commission-cutting frenzy, airlines never stooped to this. When they wanted to cut commissions, they simply cut them. They didn't pretend they were factoring out landing fees.
Maybe it's time for the cruise lines to 'fess up.