Reserve a vacation package with a travel agent in St Louis, filed under what you asked for

You can reserve a vacation package with a travel agent in St Louis here, from a catalogue of twenty-five trips. What is unusual is the filing: instead of sorting them by price or by continent, this desk files each one under the popular request it answers.

Willow Mile Press is a booking office in St Louis, Missouri, and the catalogue here is filed under twenty-five popular requests that this desk turns down, from Santorini in July to a Danube river cruise to the Camino Frances. Follow any one of those requests and you arrive at a trip this office will arrange instead, with dates, a season, a per person figure and a named operating company that we bring to you in writing.

Every page here is a set of facts somebody went and checked: what the ferry pier looks like at four in the afternoon on the eighteenth of July, what two ships of six thousand berths do to the cable car line, what a caldera room costs in the second week of July against the third week of September. This desk uses those facts to put you somewhere it can actually get you a room. It is a booking office rather than a publisher, so nothing here is a review, a grade or a ranking of anywhere, and a refusal is never a remark about the person doing the asking. If you still want Santorini in July after reading the page, plenty of people do.

You send Willow Mile Press a booking request, and this desk puts the reservation in your name with whichever company actually operates the trip. That company bills you directly, under its own contract, and pays this office a commission some weeks after you get home, so there is no checkout here and no card number is ever held. That company bills you directly, under its own contract, and pays this office a commission some weeks after you get home. The practical consequence is worth stating: our money arrives only if you go and come back, so there is nothing here to gain by putting you on something that will disappoint you. We do not sell entry documents, we do not sell coverage against loss, and we will not give you legal or medical guidance. Read the note on getting your money back before you commit to anything, because the operating company's terms are the ones that bind, not ours.

The twenty-five trips you can reserve

Every trip below is open to reserve today. The square counts how close it sits to the request it answers: four sides is the same wish at a different address, one side is a different kind of trip altogether.

the same wish, a different addressa different week, or the country next dooronly the reason for going survivesa different kind of trip altogether

The request behind the request

Nobody asks for a crowded caldera. They ask for a white town above blue water at the end of a long working year, and Santorini in July is simply the picture that comes to mind first, because it is the picture that has been in front of everyone for thirty years. The wish is sound. The specific week is the part that fails, and it fails on things nobody could reasonably be expected to know: that two ships of six thousand berths dock the same morning, that the cable car queue runs ninety minutes downhill, that a room fifty feet from the caldera edge in the second week of July costs four times what the same room costs in the third week of September.

So each of the twenty-five pages here does the same three things in the same order. It grants what is genuinely good about the popular choice, in detail and without a sting in the tail, because if we cannot say what is good about a place we have no business talking about it. It sets down the specific facts that make this office decline to arrange it, with numbers and dates rather than adjectives. Then it offers a trip we can place, and says honestly what that trip gives you from the original wish and what it does not. Two of the twenty-five end by telling you to go and do the popular thing anyway, in a different month, through somebody else. That is the whole method, and the frequently asked page works through the awkward parts of it.

Which of the two companies answers for what

Every trip here runs on two companies rather than one, and telling them apart is worth a minute of your time. Willow Mile Press Bookings LLC is the office that listens to what you want, works out which of the twenty-five wishes you have arrived with, matches it to something we can place, and sends the request through. The operating company is the one that owns the boat, holds the hotel allocation, employs the guide and puts its name on the contract you sign. When something goes wrong at eleven at night in a foreign country, it is the operating company that is contractually obliged to fix it, and its emergency number goes in the paperwork you carry.

That is not this office stepping back from responsibility, it is the shape of the industry stated out loud. Nothing in the trade belongs to us: no aircraft, no rooms, no vessel, no vehicle, and we are not a tour operator or an online booking site, and we are not affiliated with any of them. What we owe you is accuracy: that the figure we write down is the figure the operating company will bill, that the room described faces the direction we said it faces, and that we tell you the drawbacks of the thing we are recommending before you pay anyone. If you would rather see the division set out row by row before you send anything, the working method has it.

The one leg this desk does not arrange

Every figure on this site covers the ground from the moment you land. Getting to the country is the piece left out of all of them, and it is not this office that prices it. The box below hands two airports and two dates straight to the company that does, and it says first how far the flight actually is, because that is the number people underestimate.

Sending this desk a request

Start with the wish rather than the solution. Tell us the place you had in mind, the rough weeks you can travel, how many of you there are and what the outer figure is that you do not want to cross, and let us do the work of finding what fits. If you would rather say all of that out loud, +1 (314) 862-4517 reaches the office in 230 S. Bemiston Ave, Suite 914, and there is no charge and no obligation when you call a travel agent in St Louis to talk something through before you commit to anything at all. Written notes are just as welcome at desk@willowmilepress.com, and a correction to something already sent goes to corrections@willowmilepress.com.

This office keeps no counter hours and publishes none, because a printed opening time would be a promise about a person rather than about the work. What is promised instead is a deadline: every request that reaches the form is read in the order it arrived and answered within one business day, and if the answer needs longer than that you will get a note saying so and what it is waiting on.

The request form below is open at every hour of every day and never closes, so a note written at two in the morning is a perfectly ordinary way to reach this desk. Requests are read in the order they arrive and answered within one business day. A figure priced against your particular dates, with the operating company named and the exclusions written out, takes two to four working days, because it means somebody asking the operator for live availability rather than reading you a printed number. the form for a written figure explains what to put in so the reply comes back useful the first time, and every request paired with its trip is the full index of the twenty-five if you would rather browse the refusals than describe your own.