MCO — Miscellaneous Charges Order

What MCO Was For

The MCO functioned like an airline ticket but for non-flight charges: excess baggage, deposits, fare-difference collections, or services whose final cost wasn't known at the time of issue. It gave agencies and airlines a standardized, accountable paper (later electronic) form to record and later reconcile these miscellaneous amounts, distinct from the flight coupons on a passenger ticket.

From Paper to vMCO

Like passenger tickets, MCOs moved from paper stock to an electronic equivalent — the virtual MCO (vMCO) — as part of IATA's industry-wide push toward paperless, electronic accountable documents in the 2000s and early 2010s. A related electronic document, the virtual Multi-Purpose Document (vMPD), served overlapping purposes.

Legacy Status — Superseded by EMD

MCO is now legacy terminology. IATA replaced vMCO and vMPD with the EMD standard (PSC Resolutions 725f/725g/725h), and as of November 1, 2014, vMCO and vMPD are no longer supported for BSP-reporting agencies within IATA's Billing and Settlement Plan. Agencies that report through a BSP are required to use EMD-Standalone (EMD-S) instead, in line with IATA's 100%-paperless mandate.

Where MCO Still Appears

The MCO isn't entirely extinct. In the United States, some ARC-accredited travel agencies can still issue physical MCOs for a narrow set of qualifying uses defined by individual airlines — for example, Delta's agency policy lists additional collections, change fees, residual value exchanges, and group deposits as permitted MCO uses, but explicitly restricts this to ARC-accredited (not BSP-reporting) agencies. Outside these narrow exceptions, and outside the US market generally, EMD-S is the current standard. MCO terminology and processing logic also still surface in older PNRs, legacy GDS interfaces, and historical travel records, so familiarity with the term remains useful even though it is no longer the active issuance standard.

Practical Takeaway

Anyone encountering "MCO" in current documentation should treat it as the predecessor of the EMD rather than an active parallel standard: new ancillary and miscellaneous-charge transactions are issued as EMDs almost everywhere, with paper MCO issuance surviving only as a narrow, US-specific exception.