The shared inbox at Tide Harbor Travel gets roughly the same five groups of questions every month, and most of them can be answered on one screen. The answers below are the ones the desk gives on the phone, written down so you can check them at night without waiting for a reply. Anything specific to a real itinerary belongs on the contact page, where dates and headcount travel with the message.
How the work is priced
Trips are quoted as a flat planning fee or as a supplier commission, and the structure is named in writing before anything is booked. The fee covers research, bookings, documents, reconfirmations and the support that continues after departure. Nothing is added later without a message first, and the first ten minutes of any question are free, which is usually enough to decide whether a full brief is worth sending.
What to send before asking
Four details decide whether the first answer can be useful rather than general. Send them together rather than across three messages, and the reply gets shorter and faster.
- Dates you can move and dates that are fixed by school, work or a booking already made.
- The city you fly from and the number of travellers, including ages.
- The one thing the trip has to deliver: a crossing, a birthday, a week of nothing.
- Budget per person as a range, with flights inside it or clearly outside it.
How long an answer takes
Two business days is the standing commitment, and the desk is faster in the week before a departure when the queue is mostly changes. Questions about a published article go to the front, because a wrong line is a correction rather than a request. If a question needs a supplier to answer, you get an interim reply with the date the answer is expected.
Deposits, balances and changes
A deposit holds inventory and is usually non-refundable, which is why the dates and the cabin or room category are settled before it goes out. Balances fall due between sixty and ninety days before departure depending on the supplier, and every date is written into the shared document rather than left in an email. Changes after the balance are possible on most contracts, with the penalty stated in the terms that came with the quote.
Support while you travel
Support runs through the same inbox, with a phone number supplied in the documents for anything that cannot wait. A cancelled crossing, a delayed flight or a room that does not match the booking gets handled there first, and the fallback plan for the day is the thing to settle before it happens. The logistics behind that support sit in the trip planning timeline.
Corrections to the articles
Pages here get edited when a season changes, an operator renumbers its cabins or a timetable moves. Name the page and the line in the first sentence, and the correction is applied ahead of everything else in the queue. The planning pieces themselves live under Start Here, which orders them for a first visit.