what happens between your first message and a confirmed reservation
Reserve a trip through a St Louis booking office, start to finish
This page walks through everything that happens after you write to the desk. It also names the points where somebody other than Willow Mile Press takes over.
See all twenty-five trips, from $1,500 per personSend a booking request
Most people who reserve a trip through a St Louis booking office arrive already knowing where they want to go. That is the easiest kind of request to work with, because a named place can be checked.
Most people arrive here already knowing where they want to go. That is fine, and it is usually the easiest kind of request to work with, because a named place gives the desk something to price against. What is less obvious is what happens after you send the first message, so this page lays out the sequence in order, including the parts that are slow and the parts where Willow Mile Press stops being the party you are dealing with.
The short version: you write, somebody at the desk reads it and asks the questions that were missing, we go out to the companies that actually run the trips and get real numbers against your dates, and you get those numbers in writing with the inclusions and exclusions spelled out. If you say yes, the reservation is placed in your name with the operating company, and from that moment your contract is with them. Willow Mile Press never takes a payment from you. There is nowhere on this site to check out and no box anywhere that accepts a card number. The operating company bills you directly, on its own terms, and pays this office a commission some weeks after you are home. That arrangement is worth understanding before you read anything else here, because it explains why the desk has no reason to steer you toward the expensive option and no reason to hold your money.
You arrive with a wish, not a booking reference
Most notes to this desk name a place rather than a trip: somebody wants the white town above the blue water, or the mountain lake, or the fortnight of blossom. That is the right way round. Say the place and the rough weeks, and let this office work out whether the thing you named can be reserved in those weeks at all.
The desk says yes, or it says no and shows its working
If the request is one of the twenty-five on the refusal index, you get the page for it: what is genuinely good about the place, the specific facts that make this office decline the week you asked for, and the trip offered in its place with the gap between the two stated rather than smoothed over.
A figure is put in writing against your actual dates
Not a printed number off a page. Somebody asks the operating company what is free on the days you named, and writes back with a per person figure, the company’s name, what the figure covers, what it does not, and the terms that will bind you. That normally takes two to four working days.
You decide, and nothing is paid to this office
There is no checkout here and no card number is held at any point. If you say yes, the reservation is placed with the operating company, and that company bills you directly under its own contract and its own cancellation terms.
The paperwork you carry names the company that is answerable
Your documents come from the operator, carry its emergency number, and name it as the party responsible for running the trip. This office stays reachable in writing for the whole time you are away, and will chase the operator on your behalf, but it is the operator that is contractually obliged to fix what goes wrong.
first message | You describe what you have in mind and roughly when. A city, a month and a rough number of nights is enough to start. If you do not know the destination yet and only know the shape of the thing, say that instead, and describe what you want the days to feel like. Requests are read in the order they arrive and answered within one business day. // the questions back | Somebody reads the request and writes back the same day with the gaps: exact dates or a window, how many people and their ages, whether you want a fixed base or movement, and the $1,500 to $5,070 range you are working inside. This is the slowest part on your side and the most useful. // out to the operators | The desk goes to the companies that run the trip and asks for availability and cost against your specific dates, not against a brochure. Nothing is held or reserved at this stage and nothing is owed. Prices come back over two to four working days, sometimes faster in low season. // the written figure | You get a per person figure with the date it was quoted, what it covers, what it does not, and what typically gets added later. If something looked promising and came back badly priced or fully committed, that is said plainly rather than swapped quietly for something else. // your decision | You take as long as you need. If you want two options priced side by side, ask, and both arrive with the same level of detail. Nothing on this site counts down at you, and there is no board here telling you how many places remain. // the reservation | On your word, the reservation goes in under your name with the operating company. Their confirmation reaches you directly, their terms apply, and their cancellation rules govern from that point. The desk sends you the paperwork trail and stays reachable if something needs changing later.
Where the reservation is placed from
Willow Mile Press Bookings LLC, known to callers as Willow Mile Press, keeps a desk at 230 S. Bemiston Ave, Suite 914, Clayton, MO 63105, in the St Louis metro. Written notes go to desk@willowmilepress.com and the desk answers on +1 (314) 862-4517.
This is an independent booking office. No aircraft, no rooms, no vessel and no vehicle belong to it; it is neither a tour operator nor an online booking site, and nobody in that trade owns it, endorses it or speaks for it. It holds no card details, takes no payment, and issues no ticket in its own name. It sells no airfare and no sea passage of its own and holds no contract with any airline or shipping line; where a trip includes time on the water, the operating company holds that passage under its own licence and bills you for it. The company that runs your trip invoices you itself, on its own paperwork and under its own contract and that contract is the one that binds.
There are two companies involved in any trip arranged here, and they do different jobs.
What this desk will not arrange
The catalogue at what this desk reserves for each request is organized around refusals, so it would be strange not to say plainly what falls outside the work. This office does not advise on visas, passports or any entry document, and does not sell or recommend travel protection of any kind. Those are not areas where a booking desk should be improvising, and the honest answer is that you need the issuing authority or a licensed provider, not us. Medical questions and legal questions get the same answer. Nothing here is a rating, a ranking or an opinion for public consumption. This office grades nothing and publishes no opinions about anywhere; when a page says a place gets uncomfortable in August, that is a fact about heat and crowd numbers, not a score.
The harder thing to say is this. The desk will not arrange the popular trip simply because you insist on it. If you write asking for a Greek island in the first week of July, or a river cruise in the peak weeks, and the honest read of that request is that the thing you want will not survive the conditions on the ground, you will be told so, once, in specific terms: the temperature, the ship traffic, the queue at the one thing you came for. Then you will be offered something adjacent, in the same region or the same spirit, at a time or a scale where it works. If you have heard all that and still want the original, the desk does not argue and does not book it either. It will tell you the request is a good fit for a company that specializes in exactly that, and it will not pretend to be that company. There is no contempt in this. The popular places are popular because they are genuinely worth seeing, and most of them are worth seeing badly rather than not at all. It is simply that this desk is not set up to sell you the crowded version well, and a reservation placed without conviction tends to go wrong for everybody.
Reserve a trip through this office
If the sequence above sounds workable, the form below is the whole entry point, and it is the only way in that matters. Write as much or as little as you want; a paragraph is plenty and two lines is enough to get a reply. Everything arriving through it is read by a person before that working day is out, and a figure priced against your real dates follows within two to four working days once the operators come back. Detailed questions about what happens if plans change are answered at what happens if you have to pull out, the sequence in shorter form sits at how a reservation is placed here, and the things people ask most often are collected at the questions people actually ask. If you would rather send a longer brief with dates and a budget already attached, use how to ask for a price instead.
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.
You can also write to desk@willowmilepress.com directly, or call +1 (314) 862-4517 during the working week if you would rather say it out loud than type it. The office is at 230 S. Bemiston Ave, Suite 914, Clayton, MO 63105. Corrections to anything you have already sent go to corrections@willowmilepress.com, which is read by the same people. Willow Mile Press Bookings LLC is registered with the Missouri Secretary of State, and within one business day
Send this desk a booking request
This form is open 24/7 and takes booking requests at any hour. It asks for no card number and no payment, because nothing is ever paid to this office. Requests are read in the order they arrive and answered within one business day.
No card number is asked for on this page or held anywhere by this office, and sending this costs nothing and commits you to nothing. A request is not a reservation: nothing is held in your name until the operating company confirms it in writing and you have read its terms.