what is certain, and what is a chance
Vacation Package Pricing: The Certain Part and the Contingent Part
Vacation package pricing here splits in two. Part of what you pay buys something that will definitely happen. The rest buys a chance, and this page says which is which.
Two halves, and nobody separates them
Every figure in this catalog contains two different kinds of purchase, and the trade prints them as one number.
The first kind is certain. A bed exists, a train runs, a guide turns up, a meal is served. Barring something extraordinary, you will receive it.
The second kind is a chance. A boat that sails if the swell allows. A ridge that is walkable if the cloud lifts. An animal that appears where it usually appears. You are buying the opportunity and the arrangements around it, not the outcome, and on four of these nineteen the opportunity is most of what you are buying.
Once the two are separated, the price differences on this site stop being mysterious. Malta at $1,690 is almost entirely certain. The rainforest at $12,800 is a fortnight of logistics wrapped around something nobody can promise.
What the certain half buys
- A bed
- Every night the page counts, at the standard it names, with the room described rather than implied
- Movement
- Whatever the page lists: a car, a train, a driver, a berth, a charter boat held for your dates
- Food
- Counted meal by meal, never behind a phrase like half board
- Somebody who knows the ground
- With the hours stated, because a full day means different things at different firms
- A person at this end
- The same one throughout, in writing, from the first question to the last night
What the contingent half buys, and what it does not
- The arrangement
- A skipper on standby, a permit held, a vehicle and a driver waiting on a morning that may not come
- The attempt
- On the expedition trips this is bought whole and cannot be unbundled. You pay for the days at sea whether or not the ice lets you land
- The odds
- Printed on every page as a number for the months you are going. That number is the most useful thing this company can give you
- What it never buys
- The outcome. No figure on this site includes a promise about conditions, and no operator behind it offers one
Outside every figure here
- Reaching the country
- Quoted on its own once the dates harden, because a fare written down this week is fiction next week
- Meals nobody counted
- Deliberately, where choosing your own dinner is half the point
- Anything from a pharmacy
- Vaccinations, tablets, and on two of these the seasickness tablets are not a joke
- Border documents
- Yours to arrange and yours to confirm
- A policy covering the trip
- Not sold, not arranged and not advised on here, and this page will not use the weather as a reason to sell you one
- Gratuities
- Where a trip expects them, its own page says so and puts a number to it
What this company adds
Not a cent, at any stage. No fee for the conversation, none for the research, none for placing the booking, none for rebuilding it after your dates move.
The money arrives from the operator's own margin once you are home. Which has a consequence worth stating: the expensive cabin pays this company no more than the plain one, so nothing sits behind a recommendation except the recommendation.
Whose account it enters
The operator's, directly, on their own system. No till exists on this website, no card is kept, and no field could take one. Documents and receipt reach you from them, and their rules govern a refund. The page on cancellation terms works through it, including the case where the weather is the reason.