a good run is remarkable. a bad one is half a trip
Weather Dependent Vacation Packages: Half of It Hangs on Conditions
Weather dependent vacation packages, where a good run is remarkable and a bad run costs you half of what you came for. Both are printed.
These are the trips where the brochure photograph is the best day of a good season and nobody shows you the other one.
What is exposed here is not an afternoon but a category: the boat days, the diving, the aurora nights, the river. Lose the run and you have had a real holiday with the center missing from it, which is a specific and quite bitter disappointment.
So the pages carry both numbers. How often the good run happens in the month you are going, and what the itinerary actually becomes when it does not.
Five of them, from $4,620 per person
- the Yukon vacation packageeight nights in the subarctic north, aurora nights plus a dog team day, road-based
Zambia vacation packageriver and valley week with two falls mornings
Raja Ampat vacation packageten nights of boat-based diving across a remote island archipelago
Svalbard vacation packageeight nights in one Arctic town with five small-boat days off it
Greenland vacation packagecoastal trip between two settlements, four legs by small aircraft and open boat
Printed on every trip page, unasked for and ask
- The odds for your month, not for the season
- What the week becomes on a bad run, described rather than glossed
- What money comes back, which is usually a fraction and often none
The other three shapes
- Rain costs an afternoonTowns, food and coast that work wet. A bad week costs an afternoon, not the trip.5 trips, from $1,690 per person
- One set piece exposedOne cable car, one boat, one ridge. Lose it and the week still stands.5 trips, from $2,190 per person
- Half the itinerary exposedIce, swell, cloud or water level decide half the itinerary. Both outcomes are printed.5 trips, from $4,620 per person
- The whole reason for goingOne animal, one alignment, one window. It happens or it does not, and nothing is refunded.4 trips, from $5,240 per person
The stroke on each leans further as the sky takes more: upright when rain costs an afternoon, nearly flat when it can take the whole reason for going. An angle, not a color.