Speak to a travel agent in St Louis, or write to the desk

There are three ways to speak to a travel agent in St Louis about a trip, and none of them costs anything or commits you to anything. The office is at 230 S. Bemiston Ave, Suite 914, Clayton, MO 63105, in the St Louis metro.

Three ways to reach this desk

The phone rings on a desk in an office, not in a call center, and the person who picks it up is the same person who would place your reservation. If you would rather not talk, the two email addresses go to the same small group of people. Use desk@willowmilepress.com for anything you want arranged, and corrections@willowmilepress.com when something already in motion is wrong: a misspelled surname, a date that reads differently on your confirmation than it did in your head, a room type that is not what you agreed to. Splitting the two addresses is not bureaucracy. It means a correction never sits behind eleven new enquiries.

You can call a travel agent in St Louis about any of the twenty-five wishes in our the twenty-five requests and what we book instead, including the ones we decline. We will tell you plainly why we do not arrange a particular thing, what we would send you toward instead, and what the difference costs. If our answer is that you should go ahead and do the popular thing after all, and sometimes it is, you will hear that too.

Nobody from this office calls you first

This desk only answers. It does not dial out. We do not buy, rent, borrow or swap lists of names and numbers, we run no mailing list of any kind, and there is no circumstance in which somebody from here rings a person who has not asked to be rung. If you have written to us and asked for a call back, we will call at the time you named, and only then.

The practical consequence is worth stating flatly, because this industry gives people reason to be careful. If your phone rings and the voice says it is calling from Willow Mile Press with an offer, a fare that needs deciding today, or a request for a card number, it is not us. We hold no card numbers, we take no payment from travelers at all, and we have nothing on this site or on any telephone line that could accept one. The operating company that runs your trip invoices you itself, on its own paperwork and under its own terms, and our commission comes from that company once you are home. Anyone asking you to pay Willow Mile Press is describing a transaction that does not exist here. Hang up and write to corrections@willowmilepress.com if you would like us to know it happened.

Where the desk sits

230 S. Bemiston Ave, Suite 914, Clayton, MO 63105. It is a leased suite in an ordinary office building, with Willow Mile Press Bookings LLC on the door and filings on record the Missouri Secretary of State. Mail reaches us at that address, and so does anything that has to be signed and sent on paper.

Coming in person is possible and it is rarely necessary. Almost everything this office does can be done in writing, and writing has the advantage of leaving both of us a record of what was agreed. If you do want to sit down with somebody and go through dates, say so in your request and name two or three windows that work for you.

We arrange travel and we do nothing else. This office does not advise on entry documents of any kind, does not sell or recommend travel protection products, and gives no medical or legal opinion. Those are real questions with real answers, and the answers come from the consulate, the insurer and the doctor, not from a booking desk. We also grade nothing and rank nothing: no scores, no lists of the best anything, no opinions dressed up as findings. What we have is a catalogue we can actually place a reservation against, and prices from $1,500 to $5,070 per person that we will explain line by line.

What a reply takes

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.

If you have already read the order of operations you know the order things happen in, and the page of hard questions answers most of what people ask before they write. A first message does not have to be complete. Two people, late September, somewhere with a coast and a short flight is enough to start on. We will come back with questions rather than sit on it, and the the request page form asks for the same handful of facts if you would rather fill in fields than compose a paragraph.

Two things slow a written figure down more than anything else, so they are worth knowing. Fixed dates that cannot move at all take longer to price than a window of three or four days, because the operating company has to be asked about one departure rather than several. And a party that includes somebody whose plans are not yet settled, a friend who might join, a teenager whose exams are not scheduled, takes longer still, because we price what you have rather than what you might have. Tell us which parts are firm and which are not, and the answer arrives faster.

If your plans change or you decide not to go ahead, nothing here penalizes that, because you have paid us nothing. What the operating company allows once a reservation exists is a separate matter and it is set out in the cancellation terms, which is worth reading before you say yes rather than after.

Send it to the desk

Checking a reservation this desk already placed

Send the reference to the desk address above and the operating company's own record comes back to you, including the parts of it that are inconvenient. That is a person reading a file, not a lookup, and it is the only way to see a reservation this desk placed.