Well, seeing as the early-reservers paid $1500 for the 15-day trip... I think Disney would be eating it at that point. I'm frankly not surprised that they passed it on. I only hope that that's the actual increase in the fee and that Disney hasn't tacked on a profit or anything.

And if the INCREASE is $100, what did it cost before?

I'd pay an extra $500 to DO that! :snap: I'd love to be on that ship for a month. :cool:

The fee is strictly from the company that runs the Panama Canal, Disney did not mark this up. I received the same notice from every cruise line along with information from our industry news sources.

The cost increase is to help fund the expansion of the canal that is going on now, so they will be able to handle those large new cruise ships Disney is building. Completion is not scheduled until 2015 on the canal, but they are hoping by 2010 or 2011 to have it at least operational for the larger ships.

The cost was approx $79 per passenger before.

hmm, its reasonable seeing how when we built the canal it wasn't cheap in the first place...

but why didn't they give notice to cruise liners like last year rather than this year... 2 year notices are better.

Well, it's still quite a long way away, when you think about it.

I'm not real happy about the increase and Gary won't be either when he finds out it's $300 more. You would think Disney would eat it considering we're paying $8,000+ to go!

Of course this doesn't mean I'm dropping off because of a $300 difference either though!

Wow, $79 to $179 is quite a one step cost increase. The last increase was apparently 8%.

It's only a 127% increase

Update- Aug 9 -Ther was a report in the Orlando Sentinel about Disney now paying this fee. Article link here.

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/busin...,7629711.story

I have received fax confirmation on this and they will not be collecting the $100 per person, they are going to pay it themselves. Yahoo for all cruising.

I wish it mentioned what the price difference to Disney was between the previous tonnage fee compared to the new berth fee.

So Disney is eating the $500,000 that they announced a couple weeks ago but some (large?) portion of that was already built into the costs of the cruises.