Who sells cruise.
Eight pillars.
Every criterion shows its evidence.

CDX scores organisations that hold cruise bookings for consumers in four markets — the United States and Canada, the United Kingdom and Ireland, Germany, and Australia and New Zealand — across three peer groups: host and franchise networks, online and contact-centre sellers, and retail and membership chains. A distributor is admitted on any one of four published tests: ranked by sales in a national industry ranking with a cruise share of 25% or more, or as a cruise specialist; published annual cruise passengers of 100,000 or more; published annual cruise sales of US$250 million or equivalent; or named a top partner by CEI-scored cruise brands from two or more groups between 2024 and 2026. The scored unit is whichever agency identifier sits on the supplier reservation, not the network around it — a host or franchise network is scored in place of its hosted advisors, and consortia and marketing networks whose member agencies hold the booking (Virtuoso, Signature Travel Network, Travel Leaders Network, Ensemble, Internova's own consortium arm) are listed with their public scale facts rather than scored.

Fourteen distributors clear the bar in this edition, spanning all three peer groups and all four scored markets. The scope is stated plainly, including what it leaves out: continental southern European, Latin American and Asian source markets are outside Q4 2026, so this edition says nothing about the main channels serving brands sourced there, and media, metasearch and AI answer engines appear only as channel context, because they do not hold the booking.

The gaps in the rule are disclosed rather than smoothed over. The United Kingdom has no published national ranking of travel agencies by sales — its best-known list is chosen by nomination and judged assessment, not by revenue — so the sales-rank test cannot be met by any UK distributor on the public record, whatever its size. Germany's own trade-press distribution rankings exist but sit behind a paywall, so the same test cannot be applied there either. That leaves several large, well-known sellers just outside the bar this edition: Hays Travel itself, which owns Victoria Travel Group but has not published a cruise sales, share or passenger figure for its own retail business; Barrhead Travel, a large UK agency where cruise is understood to be a substantial share of the business, without a published figure behind that estimate; and WTH (UK), Imagine Cruising and Bolsover Cruise Club, each reporting a statutory turnover on a mixed commission-and-principal basis that sits below the threshold or cannot be cleanly tested against it. None of these is scored as falling short on performance; each is listed as not yet meeting a published, size-based bar.

Every criterion state cites the sources it rests on, and every source declares an evidence mode: direct primary (95), official observed surface (85), multi-source primary (80), official source snapshot (78), independent reported (70), high-confidence proxy (65), moderate-confidence proxy (45). The mode values describe evidence reliability; they do not set any score.

Coverage is the share of a card's applicable criterion points with public evidence either way (met, partly met or not met). Under 60% a card is not graded; from 60% to 79% its grade is provisional and published with a range, reading every unevidenced criterion first as zero and then as partly met.

Confidence (method counted_citations_v2) keeps the CEI's four components and weights — breadth 25%, specificity 25%, recency 30%, primary coverage 20% — recalibrated for criterion-level citation: full breadth at 12 distinct sources; a source cited on three or more cards is not specific; recency is the mean freshness of the sources cited (100 within a year of the check, 70 within two, 40 within three or undated, 10 older); primary coverage is the share of applicable criteria resting on primary evidence.

Fragility is the share of a card's earned points that rest on a single source or on proxy evidence: low under 25, moderate 25–49, high 50 and over. It answers how much of a grade would move if one citation fell.

Evidence provenance follows the CEI rule: a card's profile is the set of its per-pillar evidence modes, and a profile carried by more than three other cards is marked shared.

Verification runs in both directions, because a card can be wrong either way. A refuting skeptic re-opened every cited source and attacked every point a card earned; an upgrading skeptic searched for evidence behind every criterion that scored nothing. A reconciler applied a change only when the evidence held up on its own inspection, and where it could not settle a disagreement it took the lower state and marked the cell contested, with both sources shown.

• Not a measure of undisclosed performance. A private distributor that sells well and publishes nothing will read not graded or provisional here; that is a statement about the record, not the business.
• No criterion scores the level of resale prices or adherence to any supplier's pricing policy.
• Not a ranking of commission value, overrides or partner economics, which only a line's own production data can show.
• A complaint, review, allegation or pending case is not scored. Only final regulator or court decisions naming the entity appear, as red flags.
• Continental southern European, Latin American and Asian source markets are outside this edition, so it says nothing about the main channels of brands sourced there.
• No distributor was surveyed or interviewed for this first edition, and no confidential information entered any card.