We wanted to bring your attention to something that has come up a couple of times recently with Disney Cruise Line bookings.
When making payments on a cruise booking you’ll want to be sure you’re paying attention to the “Invoice Total”, not the “Remaining Balance”. Disney’s system will show a $0 remaining balance once the “net” total has been paid. We’ve spoken with Disney about how this can be confusing but no changes are planned for now.
If you make payments over the “net” amount, but below the “Invoice Total” amount, then you are losing commission. I’ll explain how this works with an example…
In the example below, the “Invoice Total” is $8,857.45. Commission should be $1,144.20 as shown. In this case the guest was only charged a total of $8,636.00, which is over the “net” amount but still $221.45 below the “Invoice total”.
This means that your guest was expecting to pay $8,857.45 but was only charged $8,636.00 – so they received a $221.45 discount on this sailing. This “discount” is actually coming from the commission…
So in this case Disney sends gross commission of $922.75 instead of $1,144.20.
In order to receive the full commission you have to call the guest back after their sailing and ask them to pay the remaining balance.
That’s not a pleasant experience. While the guest is only being asked to pay what they were quoted and expected to pay in the first place, it is still unpleasant to have to do after the fact.
So in order to make sure you receive all of your hard earned commission on DCL bookings, be sure to double check that you have paid the full amount of the “Invoice Total”. Forget about the amount shown in “remaining balance”.
UPDATE: We believe these errors have been happening because of a recent change DCL made by adding “Prepaid Gratuities” to the invoice which is causing confusion with Remaining Balance vs. Invoice Total as Disney does not count Prepaid Gratuities towards the Remaining Balance. Just remember to always make sure the “Previously Paid” matches the “Invoice Total”.
Hope that helps!!! We’re excited for a fantastic fall booking season for each of you!