Reserve a vacation package without paying this office anything

It is possible to reserve a vacation package without paying this office a cent, and that is not a promotion, it is how the business works. Somebody sends the dates, this desk works out who runs the trip, and the reservation is placed with that company.

Willow Mile Press is a booking office. Somebody sends in the dates and the shape of a trip, we work out who runs it, and we place the reservation with that company. The company that runs the trip bills the traveler under its own contract. We own no aircraft, no rooms, no vessel and no vehicle, and we are neither a tour operator nor an online booking site, nor the agent of one, and we have no arrangement with any of them beyond placing reservations the same way any office does.

The catalogue here is indexed by twenty five popular requests we do not arrange, which is an odd way to run a desk and generates most of the questions below. Requests are read in the order they arrive and answered within one business day.

Do I pay this office anything at all?

No, at any stage. There is no checkout on this site, no card field in any form, and no deposit held here. The operating company bills you under its own contract and pays this office a commission some weeks after you travel. The practical effect is worth stating plainly: this desk is paid only if you go and come back, so there is nothing to be gained by putting you on something that will disappoint you.

Can you arrange coverage against cancellation, or help with entry documents?

No to both, and the refusal is flat rather than a matter of price. This office does not sell, arrange, recommend or advise on insurance of any kind, and it does not sell or advise on visas, passports or entry permissions. Those are decisions to take with the issuing authority or a regulated adviser, not with a booking desk. The same goes for anything legal or medical: this office will tell you what an operator requires and will not tell you what you should do about it.

Is the name on the door a publisher?

It is not, and that is worth saying because the name reads like one. This office publishes nothing, holds no opinions worth reading, awards no grades and runs no rankings. The twenty-five refusals on this site are not reviews of anywhere. Each one is a set of checkable facts about a place at a time of year, written down because somebody asked and the answer was no, and each one ends with a trip that can actually be reserved.

Do the twenty-five refusals mean you disapprove of those places?

No. Every one of the twenty-five pages opens by setting out what is genuinely good about the thing being asked for, because if this desk could not say that it would have no business discussing it. A refusal here is a statement about arithmetic in a particular week: how many people arrive on a given morning, what a room costs against what it costs eleven weeks later, how much of a ten day trip the timetable eats. Two of the twenty-five end by telling you to go and do the popular thing after all, in a different month, through another office.

Can you book my flights, or a cruise?

No. This office arranges no carriage by air or by sea at all: it sells no flight, no airfare, no cruise and no sailing, and it holds no contract with any airline, ferry line or shipping company. Nothing on this site is a representation that a seat on a plane or a ship can be obtained here. Where a trip includes time on the water, and several do, the operating company that runs the trip holds that carriage under its own licence and its own contract with the carrier, and that company is the one that bills you for it. Getting yourself to the country is your own arrangement, and every catalogue page says what that is likely to cost so the figure in front of you is not the whole figure.

How quickly does somebody answer?

Requests are read in the order they arrive and answered within one business day. The form is open at every hour and never closes, so a note written at two in the morning is an ordinary way to reach this desk. A figure priced against your particular dates takes longer, two to four working days, because it means somebody asking the operator for live availability rather than reading you a printed number.

What happens if I have to cancel?

The operating company’s terms are the ones that apply, not this office’s, and they differ sharply between a small guesthouse and a chartered boat. You get those terms in writing, in full, before you commit to anything, and this desk will point at the expensive clause rather than let you find it later. This office charges no cancellation fee of its own because it charges you nothing at any point.

Why is there no counter opening time printed anywhere?

Because a printed opening time is a promise about a person being at a desk, and this office would rather promise something it can keep. What is promised is a deadline instead: every request is answered within one business day, and if the answer needs longer you get a note saying so and what it is waiting on. The telephone is a real line at a real desk and it is not described as answering at every hour, because it does not.

Are the prices on this site the ones I will be billed?

They are honest starting figures, written as a “from” figure per person on two people sharing, and they move with the season, the exchange rate and how far ahead you book. The figure that binds is the one the operating company puts in your confirmation, and this desk will not send you a confirmation whose figure differs from the one it quoted you without telling you why first.

Who takes my money | The company that runs the trip does, directly. Their invoice, their card form, their name on the statement. This office never sees a card number and there is no place on this site to enter one. We get paid a commission by that operator after you come home, so nothing you pay is routed through us at any stage. // Do you charge a planning fee | No. There is no fee to send in a request, no fee for the written figure that comes back, and no charge if you read it and decide against the whole thing. The commission from the operating company is the only money this office earns, and it arrives after your trip, not before it. // Is the number you send me the final one | It is a figure priced against particular dates and a particular party, and it holds while the operator's own rates hold. The operator confirms the binding total when they take your reservation, and if anything has shifted between our figure and theirs, we tell you the difference before you agree to anything. // How fast do you reply | The request form takes anything you send it at any hour, within one business day. A worked figure priced against real dates takes two to four working days, because it means writing to the operator and waiting for what they send back. Requests are read in the order they arrive and answered within one business day. // Can you hold a place while I think | Sometimes, and it depends entirely on the operator. Small companies running one boat or eight rooms will often hold for two or three days on a name alone. Larger ones want a deposit paid to them before anything is held. We ask, we tell you which it is, and we never claim a hold we have not been given. // I am one person. What does that cost me | On most trips in this catalogue, between nothing and about eighteen percent above the per person figure, which is far gentler than the cabin and cruise end of the market. The number sits in every written figure we send, on its own line, before you ask for it. Six of the twenty five walking and rail itineraries carry no single supplement at all. // Can I move my dates after reserving | Usually, and the cost is set by the operator's contract, not by us. We make the request, chase the answer and tell you the charge before anything is changed. What we will not do is move dates and present you with a bill afterwards. Read the cancellation terms before you reserve anything with dates you are unsure about. // How do I cancel | You tell us in writing and we pass it to the operator the same working day, or you write to the operator directly if you prefer, which is equally valid since your contract is with them. Refunds come from them under the terms you agreed. the cancellation terms sets out how the deadlines usually fall. // I want Santorini in July anyway. Will you book it | Honestly: no, and it is worth saying why rather than pretending we are full. Nobody here has a working relationship with anyone on that island in high season, so the reservation would be slow, the room would be whatever is left, and you would be better served by an office that works there every summer. We will say that plainly and you should go to one. // Are these refusals just snobbery | No, and the distinction matters to us. Every place in the list at the twenty-five requests and what we book instead is genuinely worth seeing, and most of them are famous for good reasons we write out on the page before we offer anything else. What we refuse is the specific combination of place, month and price that we cannot arrange well. That is a limit of this office, not a fault in what you asked for. // Do you sell travel insurance | No. This office does not sell it, does not earn anything from it, and will not tell you what to buy or whether to buy at all. Ask an insurer or a broker licensed where you live. If an operator's contract requires cover, we will point at the clause and stop there. // Can you advise on visas or entry documents | No, none of it. Not visas, not passports, not anything about entry rules or what a border will ask you for. Those rules change without notice and getting them wrong is your trip, not ours. Check with the relevant consulate or an immigration attorney, and do it early, because some of what we book has long lead times. // What about vaccinations or health questions | No. We are not qualified and will not guess. A physician or a travel health clinic answers those, and we would rather you heard it from them than from a booking office in Missouri. We will happily tell you the altitude of a lodge or how far the nearest town is, since those are facts about the place. // Do you run any of these trips yourselves | No. Not one. Every trip in this catalogue is operated by a separate company that owns the vehicles or the boat, employs the guides, and carries the licenses. We arrange, they operate, and the split is set out in full at the order of operations. If something goes wrong on the ground, the operator is responsible, and we will help you reach them. // Will you book my flights | Not as a rule. Most of what is here starts in a city you can reach on your own booking, and the operator's itinerary begins at an airport or a station. If a trip includes an internal flight, that flight is part of the operator's package and they hold it. There is a fare lookup on this site you are welcome to use for the long leg. // Can you take a group | Up to about fourteen, yes, and several trips in the catalogue work better at eight than at two. Beyond fourteen the arithmetic changes, most operators want a separate contract, and you should talk to a company that handles that daily. Tell us the real number in the first message rather than growing it later. // Is this a publishing house | No. Nothing here is published in any sense. Willow Mile Press is a booking office and the only thing it produces is reservations, written figures and the pages describing what it will arrange. There is no staff of writers, no readership and no content operation of any kind behind it. // Is anything on this site a judgement about a place | No. The site grades nothing, scores nothing, awards nothing, and prints no opinions about the quality of any destination, hotel or company. Where a page says a coast is crowded in August, that is a fact about how many people are there. Where it says a room is small, that is a measurement. // Why is the catalogue organized backwards | Because that is how the conversations actually start. People arrive naming a place they have seen a hundred times, and about half the time the thing they want from it exists somewhere we can arrange properly. Indexing by the request rather than by our own products means you find the answer at the point you would ask the question. // Do you have offices in the places you book | No. One office, at 230 S. Bemiston Ave, Suite 914, Clayton, MO 63105. What we have in each region is a working relationship with the company that runs the trip, which is a different thing and a more useful one. Nobody from here meets you at the airport, and no page on this site suggests otherwise. // Can I come in and talk it through | Yes, if you write first so somebody is at the desk when you arrive. Most of this work happens in writing anyway, because dates, party sizes and room configurations survive better on paper than in a conversation neither of us wrote down. // Do I have to use the form | No. The form at the request page exists because it asks the six things we would otherwise have to ask you, and it saves a round of messages. Writing to desk@willowmilepress.com in your own words works fine. If something has gone wrong with a reservation already placed, use corrections@willowmilepress.com and it gets read sooner. // What if you cannot arrange what I want at all | We say so and tell you what kind of office would be a better fit, sometimes on the same day. This happens most weeks and it is not a failure. An office that says yes to everything places bad reservations, and a bad reservation is worse for you than an honest refusal in the first reply. // Where does the paperwork live | The company details, the filing at the Missouri Secretary of State, the address and the phone number sit on every page of this site, in the same place each time. The terms of any trip are the operator's own, and we send them to you in full before you agree to anything rather than summarizing them here. ::

Anything that is not answered here

If your question is not in the list, write it out and send it. Questions that keep arriving get added to this page, which is why it is longer than it was, and there is no reward for phrasing something in the way you think a booking office wants to hear. The awkward ones are usually the useful ones: what happens if my mother cannot walk four miles, whether two rooms can be adjacent, what the food is like when nobody eats dairy.

Price questions get straighter answers when you name the dates. Trips in this catalogue run from $1,500 to $5,070 per person, and the spread inside that range comes almost entirely from month, room type and how much of the day is arranged for you. A figure with no dates attached is a guess, and this office does not send guesses.

This office keeps no counter hours and publishes none, because a printed opening time would be a promise about a person rather than about the work. What is promised instead is a deadline: every request that reaches the form is read in the order it arrived and answered within one business day, and if the answer needs longer than that you will get a note saying so and what it is waiting on.

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