- Filed as
- Birchway Point Bookings LLC
- Filed with
- the North Carolina Secretary of State
- Office
- 324 West Wendover Avenue, Greensboro, NC 27408
- Telephone
- (336) 680-4173
- Booking requests
- overland@birchwaypoint.com
- Corrections and anything already agreed
- casework@birchwaypoint.com
- What the office runs
- nothing; it carries nobody
Seventeen trips sit on the list at any time. This office does one job with them: a travel agent in Greensboro, North Carolina reads your request, checks what the operating company still has open, and files the reservation under your name. Booking here means that and only that. No money changes hands at this desk, no card number is written down, no card number is asked for, and there is no checkout on any page of this site. The company that runs the trip bills you directly on its own schedule, and it settles a commission with this desk once the trip is over. That is the whole arrangement, and it is why the price you see is the price the operator sets rather than something marked up on the way through.
Why the filing works this way
Ten years of intake produced one complaint far more often than any other, and it was never the one people expect. Almost nobody wrote in angry about landing in a place that turned out to be wrong for them. What they wrote in about was arriving too late for the thing they actually wanted. The river week that fills in November for the following September. The lodge with eleven rooms that takes the year's bookings in a single morning. The crossing that runs twice a season and closes its book eighteen months ahead. In every one of those cases the person had picked correctly. They had simply asked in April about something whose book had opened and shut in October, and nobody had ever told them when the book opened.
So the list is filed by notice rather than by region or by price. Four tiers, in order. Short notice covers a few weeks out, where you take what is still open and the shape of the trip bends to that. One season is three to five months, the ordinary window, and most of the seventeen live there. Most of a year runs eight to twelve months, where the trip as a whole is fine but one or two pieces of it sell out well before the rest. Two winters is eighteen months or more, and it exists because something inside the trip opens its book once a year or is capped by the operator at a number that has not changed in a decade.
Read that way, the list answers the question people should have asked first. Not where, but when do I need to have decided.
The work that sits behind a filed request
This office, in Greensboro
- Opens what arrives before that working day is out, and replies as a person.
- Establishes in writing when each part of a trip opens its book, and what the cap is.
- Says what is realistically left at your date, including when the answer is nothing.
- Puts the question to the operating company and repeats the answer word for word.
- Sets out that company's own withdrawal deadlines next to the number, whole.
- Holds the file, so the same story is never told to two different people.
The company that actually runs it
- Owns or contracts every bed, boat, permit and guide in this catalog.
- Supplies the accommodation inside the package. This office lets nothing, manages nothing and rents no property to anybody.
- Fixes the number, and fixes every date past which withdrawing costs you.
- Collects the money, keeps it, and decides what coming back looks like.
- Opens its book on its own day and closes it when the cap is reached.
- Settles a commission with this desk once the trip is behind you, never sooner.
A booking office, not a property company
The name reads like an address. It reads like an apartment community, or a subdivision sign at the end of a road, and enough people have written in expecting a leasing office that it belongs here in plain words. Birchway Point Bookings LLC does not own, lease, manage, or rent housing of any kind. It does not own or run vehicles, boats, aircraft, lodges, or any part of any trip on the list. Every trip is operated by an independent company, and this office is a separate business that files a booking request with that company on your behalf. If a trip goes ahead, the operator is the one performing it and the one whose terms govern it.
The same line holds for anything you might expect an office like this to sell alongside a trip. Insurance, visas, and passports are outside what Birchway Point does, and nobody here will advise you on them. Questions of that kind go to the parties who actually handle them.
Reaching the desk, and how long it takes
There is no attendance timetable on this site and there will not be one. Hours on a door answer a question nobody is asking, which is whether a human being happens to be sitting down at this moment. The question that matters is how long you wait for something useful. So: the request form is awake 24/7 and shuts for nothing, whatever lands in it is opened by a person before that working day is out, and a number against your own dates takes two to four working days because a second company has to answer first. No figure is guessed at to make the wait shorter.
A message sent to overland@birchwaypoint.com is seen before that working day is out. A written figure, meaning the itemized numbers for a specific trip with a specific party on specific dates, pricing it out needs two to four working days, because most of that time is spent waiting on the operating company to confirm what it still holds. The telephone at (336) 680-4173 reaches somebody at the desk who can talk through the tiers and tell you which book is open. If you would rather see the sequence written down before you send anything, it is set out at the order the work happens in, the terms for changing or ending a booking are at the cost of pulling out, and whatever comes up most often is dealt with at what people ask before they commit.