Step two takes the longest and takes the most typing. It is also the only reason a booking office in Greensboro is worth writing to instead of filling in a form somewhere. When you plan and book a trip with an agent here, somebody sits down and establishes, in writing, when each separate component of your trip opens its book, what the cap on that component is, and what is realistically still open at the date you have in mind.
That is the work. Everything on either side of it is correspondence.
To be plain about what this office is: Birchway Point Bookings LLC is a booking office. We take reservation requests, we correspond with you, and we place the reservation with the company that actually operates the trip. We do not run a single vehicle, lodge, boat or guide. We take no payment at any stage, we hold no card number on file, and there is no checkout anywhere on this site. No card ever reaches this office. When money changes hands it changes hands between you and the operating company, on their paper, under their terms.
Whatever else changes between the first message and the departure, one thing does not: no card ever reaches this office, at any step below.
- Send the requestUse the form at the foot of this page, or write to overland@birchwaypoint.com. Give us a rough month, a rough number of people, and which of the seventeen trips caught your eye. read the day it lands. You do not need dates locked, and you do not need to be sure.
- The written windowSomebody goes through your trip component by component and puts the answer in writing: the date each book opens, the cap on each piece, and what is left at your date as of the morning we looked. A permit block of thirty, a lodge of nine rooms and a two-winters departure that opens once a year are three different problems, and they get three separate lines. This the figure itself lands two to four working days later. It arrives as a written figure with the price per person on it, somewhere between $1,890 and $4,450.
- Read it and argue with itMost people move their month by two or three weeks once they see which piece is the tight one. Some drop a component and keep the rest. Some go and think about it for a season. All three are ordinary and none of them costs you anything. Write back as many times as you like.
- We place the reservationOn your written say-so, this office contacts the operating company and asks them to hold the components in your name. What they can hold and for how long is their decision, not ours, and we tell you what they said rather than what we hoped they would say.
- Their paperwork reaches youThe operating company sends you their confirmation, their terms and their payment instructions directly. Read the cancellation terms before you pay them anything. Ours are at the cost of pulling out; theirs are the ones that bind you, and the two are not the same document.
Four things nobody here can do for you
- Open a book early
- If a permit office releases on the first Tuesday of February, it releases on the first Tuesday of February. We can have your request written and sitting ready that morning. We cannot move the morning.
- Hold a cap open
- A cap of twelve is twelve. When a component is full it is full, and an office that tells you otherwise is telling you about its own optimism.
- Invent a room
- Where a lodge has nine rooms and eight are spoken for, there are eight. We will tell you about the ninth and about the second lodge forty minutes away, and that is the entire set of options.
- Promise a permit
- Permits belong to the body that issues them. We can tell you the date, the quota and what happened last year. Nobody who is not that body can promise you one.
What the five steps cost you
Nothing, at any step. Not the written window, not the third rewrite of it, not the placing of the reservation. This office charges the traveler no fee of any kind: no research fee, no planning fee, no service fee, no fee for changing your mind in step three.
The office is paid by the company that operates your trip, as a commission, after you have traveled. That is the whole arrangement and it is worth knowing two consequences of it. First, we are paid nothing at all if you go and never book, which happens often enough and is fine. Second, commission rates differ between operating companies, and the honest thing to say about that is that we tell you what we think fits your month and your budget, and you are entitled to ask why a particular trip is on your list. People do ask. The answer is usually the calendar.
Prices on this site run from $1,890 to $4,450 per person and are written as a starting figure. The operating company confirms the final number on their own paperwork.
Questions that come up before step one are collected at what people ask before they commit, and the five steps are set out in shorter form at the order the work happens in. If you would rather talk it through, (336) 680-4173 reaches somebody in Greensboro who can take the outline down and start step two from a conversation instead of a message.