From first email to airport pickup

The six steps

1. You send an enquiry. Dates, party size, countries that matter. If you have read a route you like, name it. Nothing else is needed.
2. We reply within one working day with a routing sketch. Not a full itinerary — a route, a day count and a price band, plus a straight answer about whether your days fit your countries.
3. We build the itinerary. Two to four working days for a multi-country trip, because hotel availability in four countries has to be checked before we write anything down. Hotels are named. Flights are shown with times.
4. You change it. Two rounds of revision, no charge. Most trips use both. This is the stage where the trip becomes yours rather than ours.
5. Deposit of 25 per cent confirms it. We hold the hotels and issue the flight tickets. From this point, changes cost whatever the suppliers charge us and we show you the invoice.
6. Final documents 21 days out, with the balance. Vouchers, guide names, driver phone numbers, a visa checklist for your specific passport, and the border briefing if your route crosses on land.

The two decisions a multi-country trip forces early

Your entry and exit airports

Almost every good four-country route is open-jaw: in at one end, out at the other. Hanoi in and Bangkok out is the most common shape. That decision has to be made before we can price anything, because it determines the direction of travel and therefore which borders you cross in which order.

If you have already booked a return ticket into and out of the same city, say so at the enquiry stage. It is not fatal, but it usually costs a day and sometimes an internal flight.

Visas, six weeks out

Four countries means up to four visa processes, and one of them — the Laos eVisa — is not valid at most land crossings from Vietnam. If your route enters Laos overland from Vietnam anywhere other than Dansavanh–Lao Bao, you need a visa in your passport from an embassy before you fly, and that takes time.

We send a checklist specific to your passport and your route once the itinerary is fixed. Read visas and entry for the full picture.

What you get before you fly

• A day-by-day itinerary with named hotels, confirmation numbers and check-in times
• All flight tickets we have issued, in your name, with baggage allowance stated
• A visa checklist written for your passport and your exact border crossings
• Guide names and mobile numbers for each country, and driver numbers for each transfer
• A one-page border briefing for every land crossing: opening hours, what to carry, what the queue looks like, what the fake fees are
• A 24-hour number that reaches a person in the country you are in, not a call centre elsewhere

Changing or cancelling

Changes before the deposit are free and unlimited. After the deposit, we pass through what the suppliers charge us and nothing more; you see the supplier invoice.

Our ladder starts at 45 days rather than the more common 30 because multi-country trips commit money early: intra-regional flights are usually non-refundable from the moment they are issued, and the best small hotels in Luang Prabang and Nong Khiaw want a deposit two months out. We would rather show you the real shape of it than pretend the money is recoverable when it is not.

If something goes wrong while you are travelling

The realistic list, in order of how often it happens: a domestic flight is retimed, a road is closed by rain, a border queue takes two hours instead of forty minutes, someone gets ill.

1. Call the country number on your documents. It reaches a person in that country, in that time zone.
2. We rebook. Where a change costs money, we pay it first and settle with you at the end rather than negotiating in a hotel lobby.
3. Where a service cannot be delivered at all, we refund the supplier cost of it. We do not refund weather.

We do not use a single regional office as a shell for four countries. Each country has staff we work with directly, which is why the phone number changes when you cross a border.

Questions travellers ask most

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