Reserve a dated trip with an independent travel agent, and see how the office is put together

Roving Hours is a booking office in Orlando, Orange, Florida, and the catalogue is twenty eight trips priced $3,061 to $6,939. Each of them is attached to something that happens on particular dates, so what you get when you reserve a dated trip with an independent travel agent is a second person reading the calendar: somebody whose work is to hold the weeks you can travel against the weeks the thing itself is running.

That is the whole shape of the business. A request arrives carrying two facts, when you are free and what you want to stand in front of. The office checks those against the operating company's dated list for that season, prices the exact week, sets out what the week covers and what it leaves to you, and holds the place once you say to hold it. Roving Hours Bookings LLC is the company behind the name, and one address, one telephone line and two mailboxes are the whole of its plant.

Who sends the invoice and who pays this office

The company running your days on the ground invoices you itself, under its own conditions, and that is where your money goes. This office handles none of it. No figure is taken here, no deposit and no balance, and a card number is never asked for, stored or seen at any stage, which is why the site carries nowhere to type one in.

What this office earns arrives later and from the other side: the operating company pays a commission once you have been and come home. Two things follow, and both are worth knowing before you write in. First, the office is paid on trips that actually take place, so moving your week onto better dates costs it nothing, and it will tell you when better dates exist. Second, since the invoice belongs to the operator, so does the sum on it, which is why every figure in this catalogue is a starting point that the operator confirms in writing before anything is held.

Whose responsibility is whose

Aircraft, rooms, vessels, vehicles and guided evenings on these pages belong to other companies. Not one of those companies holds a share of Roving Hours Bookings LLC, has appointed it to speak in their name, or has put its own name behind this office in any form. The office keeps no aircraft, no beds, no boats, no vehicles and no guides on its books, employs neither driver nor warden, and runs no tour of its own. It is an agency, and its work begins and ends with arranging and holding places with the companies that do own those things.

Neither is this an online booking site. No live inventory sits behind this page and nothing on it holds a place by itself. A request comes in as a sentence written by a person and goes back out as a quote written by a person, which is slower than a search box and better suited to trips whose dates move by a fortnight in either direction.

Where a trip crosses water, the operating company holds that crossing under a licence of its own and arranges it as part of the week. Your flight out of Orlando is your own arrangement, bought wherever you normally buy such things, and this office stays out of it. What it will do is name the day you need to be on the ground, and work the ground week backward from there.

Selling a week, not a country

Most agencies sell a place and leave you to pick a date. This one sells the date, because the twenty eight things in the catalogue exist only while they are happening: six weeks of pressing that runs day and night, a fortnight of ice that arrives from the north and goes, five winter months of one bird roost, four nights of a river running high enough to matter. the whole year laid out in one strip draws every one of them as a bar across a twelve month strip, so a week in February reads down the column and a trip reads across its bar. what is open in the weeks you can travel takes the same information the other way about, for readers who already know when they are free.

The second measure is the hour. Every trip carries a mark from one to four for how much of the day the arrangement actually occupies: one fixed hour, a morning or an evening, most of the daylight, or from before dawn until after dark. A mark of one is a thin day only if you read it wrong, because the rest of those hours are yours to spend as you like. Anybody who dislikes being programmed should read the mark before the price.

Several of the windows stand on wild behavior, and wild behavior is underwritten by nobody. Where a page sets out what a given evening usually does, it also gives the shape of the evenings that fall short, and those trips carry enough nights in them that a quiet evening leaves the week intact.

From a sentence to a held place

how a request becomes a held window sets out the sequence in order. In short: you write, the office answers within one business day, the two of you settle the week, and the operator confirms it in writing before anything is committed. request a trip quote 24/7 is the form, and three lines about your dates and your number is enough to start. Nothing goes out from here that you did not ask for. The office answers requests and returns quotes; it rings nobody, and it sends no text messages at all, so anything reaching you by those routes came from somewhere else.

the terms for ending a booking early carries the terms for changing or dropping a reservation, and they are the operator's terms rather than this office's, set out so you can read them before you commit to a week. what gets asked most often before people commit answers what people ask most often, including the questions whose honest answer is unwelcome.

The form stays open every hour of every day of the year. What it collects is a request and not a reservation, a person reads it, and an answer is written within one business day.

The office is at 1350 N. Orange Avenue, Suite 221, Orlando, FL 32789, and it answers on +1 (407) 629-3157. Write to bookings@rovinghours.com with a window and the number of travelers, or to corrections@rovinghours.com when something on a quote already sent needs putting right.