Four facts carry a quotation. Everything else can be settled later, and usually is. You can send a trip request 24/7 using the form at the bottom of this page, and what comes back is a written figure with the arithmetic shown: what the per person number covers, what it leaves out, and which pieces of the trip are the ones that close early.
Birchway Point is a booking office. Birchway Point Bookings LLC takes booking requests and arranges the reservation with the operating company that runs the trip. We take no payment from you at any stage, we hold no card, and there is no checkout anywhere on this site. When you decide to go ahead, the operating company bills you on its own terms, and this desk is settled with afterward by that company. That is the whole commercial arrangement, and it is the reason the quotation costs you nothing to ask for.
The seventeen trips in the catalog are filed by how much notice they need, from a few weeks out to eighteen months and more. That filing matters more than any other single thing when a figure is being put together, because a trip that opens its book once a year cannot be priced the same way as one where you take what is still open.
The four facts a figure rests on
- A month or a season
- Even "late spring" is enough. Prices move by several hundred dollars per person between shoulder and peak on most of the seventeen, and a figure written without a month is a figure written twice.
- How far ahead you are working
- Say the year if you know it. This is what tells us which of the four notice tiers you are shopping in, and whether the trip you named is even open that far out.
- How much the dates can move
- Three days of movement is often worth more than any other single lever. If the dates are fixed by a wedding or a semester, say so and we will stop looking for that saving.
- A rough ceiling
- A number per person, or a range. Nobody is held to it. It decides which room grade, which rail class and which of the seventeen get written up at all.
Two of the four are usually easy and two feel like guesswork. Guess anyway. A ceiling of "somewhere around three thousand five hundred, more if it is worth it" is a useful sentence, and it saves you reading a quotation built around a trip you were never going to take.
What happens between your message and the figure
- Same working dayYour message is read and acknowledged by a person here in Greensboro, NC. If the four facts leave a gap, the acknowledgment asks about the gap and nothing else.
- Day one to twoWe check live availability with the operating companies for the trip or trips you named, in the month you named. This is where a most-of-a-year or two-winters trip either has room or does not.
- Day two to fourThe written quotation is drafted: per person cost, what is inside it, what sits outside it, the deposit the operating company will want and when, and the date after which the price is no longer good.
- After you read itAsk for it again with different dates, a different room grade or a different trip. Redrafts are ordinary and cost nothing. Most requests here go around twice.
- When you say go aheadWe place the reservation with the operating company and it contacts you directly to take payment on its own terms. Cancellation terms are the operator's and are set out at the cost of pulling out.
If you would rather talk it through before writing anything down, you can speak to a travel agent at (336) 680-4173 and we will take the four facts by voice and write them up the same way.
Nothing here asks you for these
There is no card field on this form and no card field anywhere on this site. There is no deposit link, no hold, no pre-authorization and no stored payment method, because Birchway Point Bookings LLC never handles the money for a trip.
There is no clock on this page. No figure expires because you took a week to think, and no quotation carries a countdown. The only real deadline is the operating company's own, and when one exists it is named in writing inside the quotation with the actual date on it.
You are not asked anything about your health, your fitness or your medical history, and we do not judge whether a trip suits your body. Where an operating company sets a condition of its own on a trip, that condition is quoted to you in the operator's words and you decide. We also do not sell or advise on insurance, visas or passports, and questions about all three are answered plainly at what people ask before they commit.
Names of other travelers, seat preferences and dietary notes are not needed at this stage either. They belong to the reservation, not to the quotation, and they are collected later by whoever ends up holding the booking.
Write to the office
a written number follows inside two to four working days. If a week goes by with nothing from us, write to casework@birchwaypoint.com and say so, because it means a message went astray. The stages in full are set out at the order the work happens in.