three different cancellations, and only one is yours
Cancellation and Weather Policy
The cancellation and weather policy here separates three different events that the trade prints as one: you cancel, the operator cancels, or the sky does. The third is the one nobody explains.
Read this line first
Your money never reaches this company. It goes to whoever is carrying you, housing you or taking you out on the water, and it sits with them. Anything that comes back comes back from them, on rules they wrote.
The first cancellation: you change your mind
- While you are still decidingNo debt exists and no money moves. Drop it here and it costs you nothing, and no one from this office follows up to change your mind
- The day you agreeThe operator's terms take hold whole, word for word as your proposal set them out. The deposit is usually taken now and usually stays with them
- Sixty to ninety days outThe balance falls due somewhere in that window on most of these. The exact day is on your proposal
- Past itMost of these operators keep most of the money, and on the expedition trips all of it
The second cancellation: the operator calls it off
What comes back to you is settled by the supplier's terms, and you had those terms in hand before you said yes. A refund is theirs to make and never this company's. What this desk does is push, put every exchange on paper, and tell you outright when the handling looks poor. Paying it from our own funds is the one thing outside our reach.
The third cancellation: the weather calls it off
This is the one the trade prints in the smallest type, and it is the reason this site exists in the shape it does.
When conditions cancel something, the operator has usually done everything it promised. The skipper turned up. The vehicle was fuelled and waiting. The permit was held and paid for. The crew were on the payroll. The only thing that did not arrive was the weather, and no clause anywhere makes anybody liable for that.
- What that means in money
- On most of these trips, nothing comes back. Not from the operator, and not from this company, which never held it
- What sometimes comes back
- An unused entry fee, a boat charge that was never incurred, or a night's accommodation that was released in time. Small, and never the whole thing
- What comes back on the expedition trips
- Nothing at all. A berth for eight days is bought whole and the days at sea happen whether or not the ice lets you land
- Whether you are told this in advance
- On every page, in the fourth row, before any figure appears
What the level of exposure changes
- Rain costs an afternoon
- Nothing to unwind. Nothing was contingent, so nothing is lost
- One set piece exposed
- The single item sometimes refunds if it never ran, and usually a substitute is offered instead. The page says which
- Half the itinerary exposed
- Partial at best. A boat day that never sailed may credit; the days ashore around it will not
- The whole reason exposed
- Nothing. And that is stated in the first paragraph of all four of those pages rather than in a footnote
Four things you will not be told here
- That the deadlines bend
- Somebody else set them and only that somebody can move them
- That the weather risk can be removed
- It cannot, by anybody, at any price
- That a policy would fix it
- Nothing of the kind is sold or arranged here, and this page will not use your anxiety to point you at one
- That we would have known
- Where the odds were long we said so on the page before you booked, and where we did not, we will say that too