Diamond Olly raised the very vaild point about Air Passenger Duty. Any form of Tax is not commissionable Insurance IPT is another example.
Current reduced rates* of Air Passenger Duty is £5 for specified European destinations and £20 for all other destinations per air passanger over the age of 2. *The reduce rate applies to most charter flight seats.So if a screen qoute is £169 for a charter flight to a euro destination you would minus the £5 to get £164 which is the base to calculating percentages from.
As i pointed out before most retail agencies use a basic add on figure after the net commission price to guareente a set basic profit per individual booking. Even this can be negotiated down if you have a party of 4 or more adults.
For an example lets use TUI in this case.. the agent will make a minimum of £15 per individual flight seat so on booking of 4 adults thats a
guaranteed profit of £60 on the flight booking, even if the customers been canny and got the standard comm rates knocked off.
Now if your party has 5 or more adults you can start to get the £15 min more towards £10. Say for example you have a party of six adults, 6 x 10 is the same £60 in profit for the agent. The front line sales agent will often need authorization from the sales team manager,but if the customer has said they will book and got the credit card number ready , the sales managers rarely turn the offer down on a guaranteed booking.
So even if the agents say some items have are none commissionable and with tax that is the clear case, you can still offset this by knowing how the minium ratail sales price works!
Its not easy and does take time and work playing agents off to get the agents down to cost minimums, but if you know what you want it is very possable to do.
On a side note I should say front line staff are between a rock and a hard plate. They offen neeed to make 5-6K in profits for the company before they get anything above their basic for themselfs. Thats 400 bookings per month to do just before they get a bonus. As Diamond Olly points out they do extra things that don't often result in a sale as most punters are cost fixed only.
Hopefully these posts give an idea of how things work and its up to the individual how hard they are on the agents bottom line. Most of the best sales agents got high volume on bookings sales due to people coming back to them after they've "done the rounds" because the customer liked the agents knowlodge and general customer interaction rather than the cut to the bone price.
EXACTLY 
