Sixteen trips on this site are run by fifteen separate companies. That number matters more than anything else on the page, because cancellation terms on a booked trip come from whichever of those fifteen holds the reservation, and no two of them have written the same schedule. One walking outfit in the eastern Alps wants a deposit that stops being refundable at ninety days. A small island operator in the Baltic asks for nothing until sixty days and then wants the whole sum. We did not negotiate either one and we cannot bend either one. The operating company sets the terms, and this office reads them back to you before your name goes on anything.
What we do here is narrow enough to state in a sentence. You send a booking request, we arrange the reservation with the company that runs the trip, and that company bills you directly on its own schedule. This office takes no payment, holds no card number, and there is no checkout anywhere on this site. The commission that pays us comes from the operator after you travel. It follows that a refund never passes through us, and any figure we quote about one is the operator's figure repeated accurately, in writing, with the date it was quoted.
Request goes in | Nothing is committed and nothing is owed. Withdraw by writing to casebook@thebriarreview.com and the file simply closes. // Written figure comes back | Two to four working days. It carries the price, the deposit, the refund dates and the operator's name. Reading it costs nothing. // You accept and the operator invoices | The deposit is paid to that company, not to us. From this moment the operator's schedule governs, and the dates in your written figure are the dates that bind. // Balance date passes | Usually somewhere between ninety and thirty days out, depending on the company. After it, most operators refund little or nothing, and several refund nothing at all.
Eight pairs, and what a switch actually costs
Switching halves after the deposit | Treat it as two transactions, because it is. Cancelling the Dolomites and starting the Julian Alps means the first operator's cancellation schedule applies in full and the second operator's deposit is a fresh one. The pairing lives on this site, not in their books. // Whether two operators share a deadline | Almost never. Connemara and Donegal sit forty miles apart and are run by companies whose balance dates fall eleven weeks apart. We have one pair, the Harz and the Eifel, run by the same German company on the same schedule, and that is the only one. // A deposit on the half you did not want | Worth whatever that operator's schedule says on the day you write, and nothing more. Inside their free window it comes back whole. Outside it, it is gone, and calling it a transfer does not move it. Nobody credits it against the other half. // Changing the name on a booking | Costs less than cancelling and rebooking in every case we have handled, though the operating company sets the fee and states it in writing. Most of the sixteen allow a substitution up to the balance date for an administrative charge the operator names. Two of the ferry-dependent trips, Arran and Mull, need the change made before the sailing is ticketed. Ask early and it is usually a small fixed fee. Ask late and it becomes a cancellation.
When the dates go against you
Nothing on this page is a threat and none of it is our money. Still, the deadlines are real, and people who have paid a deposit sometimes find themselves on the wrong side of one. When that happens we do three things and we say plainly that they are the only three available to us.
We write to the operator on your behalf and put the request in front of a person rather than a form. We ask what discretion exists, because a good many companies keep some and never advertise it. And we tell you the answer without dressing it up, including when the answer is no.
We do not argue that a rule should not apply to you, we do not promise a result before the operator has given one, and we never tell you a refund is coming until it is written down by the company paying it. If a trip is cancelled by the operator rather than by you, that same operator's policy states what you are owed, and we will read it to you the same way.
One further thing worth knowing about the pairs. Because we set two places side by side and decline to choose between them, some people book one and keep wondering about the other. Wonder before the deposit, not after. The written figure is free, you may ask for both halves of a pair at once, and holding two figures beside each other for a week costs you nothing at all. Once a deposit is in, the pairing is over and there are only invoices.