Everything on this page starts from one fact that is easy to miss when you are reading quickly. Quiet Quarterly Bookings LLC arranges the booking. A different company runs the trip, bills you directly, and writes the contract you agreed to when you paid it. When you want to move a date or take a name off a reservation, the answer comes from that company and from the paperwork it sent you, not from this office and not from this page. What is written here describes the shapes those answers usually take, so that you can guess roughly what you are in for before anyone tells you.
That also means the two questions travellers ask this office most often have short, unsatisfying answers. Will Quiet Quarterly refund me: no, because no money ever came here. Can Quiet Quarterly waive the fee: no, because the fee belongs to somebody else's balance sheet. What this office can do is put your situation to the operating company in writing, chase it until it answers, and tell you the answer without decorating it. That is a real service and it is worth asking for, but it is narrower than most people expect, and pretending otherwise on a page like this would be a lie you would discover at the worst possible moment.
Situations that come up, and roughly what they cost
- changing a spelling on a name
- Free with most land based operators if you catch it early. Where a flight is already ticketed, a correction of one or two letters is often possible and a genuine change of traveller usually is not. Tell this office the moment you notice.
- moving to different dates before a deposit
- Usually costs nothing at all, because nothing is confirmed yet. The catch is that the new dates have to still exist. On the trips listed under how a request is handled where departures run three or four times a season, the alternative may be eleven months away.
- moving dates after a deposit
- Commonly a fixed administrative charge of $50 to $150 per person, plus any difference in the price of the new departure, and the difference is often the larger number. Some companies treat a move of more than 60 days as a cancellation and a fresh booking.
- cancelling before you have paid a deposit
- Nothing is owed and nothing is charged. Send one line to casement@quietquarterly.com and this office withdraws the request. No explanation is needed and none will be asked for.
- cancelling after a deposit
- The deposit is usually gone. Beyond that, most operating companies work on a sliding scale keyed to the departure date, tightening in steps at roughly 90, 60 and 30 days out, and reaching the full price somewhere inside the final month.
- the operating company cancels on you
- Their obligation, on their terms, and it is normally a full refund of what you paid them or a place on another departure. What they almost never cover is anything you booked separately, such as your own flights to the start point.
- weather, closed roads, a cancelled sailing
- Rarely a refund. Most contracts allow the company to substitute a route or a night's lodging of similar standard, and that is the usual outcome. If a whole departure is called off you are back in the row above.
- illness, injury, a death in the family
- The operating company's compassionate policy, if it has one, is the only route to money back. This office does not sell or advise on travel insurance and cannot tell you whether a policy you already hold will pay. Ask whoever wrote that policy.
- a passport or entry document that did not arrive in time
- Treated as your cancellation, at the day's rate on the sliding scale. This office does not handle, check or advise on entry documents of any kind, and this is the one situation where that limit hurts most.
Three of those rows say "usually" or "commonly", and the vagueness is deliberate rather than lazy. Twenty-two trips sit on this site and they are run by different companies with different contracts. A small operator in New York running four departures a year and a large one selling the same week fifty times over do not price a change the same way, and one of them will sometimes waive a charge the other applies without discussion. The only figures worth acting on are the ones in the confirmation you were sent.
Putting it to the company, and stopping there
When you write to this office about a change, what happens next is mechanical. Someone reads what you sent, pulls your file, works out which company holds the reservation and what stage it is at, and sends that company a written question with your booking reference, the change you want and the date you asked for it. That last detail matters more than it looks: on a sliding scale, the day the request was received is frequently the day the price is calculated from, and having it in writing has saved travellers real money.
Then this office waits, and chases, and reports back. It reports the answer as given, including the parts you will not like. It does not soften a refusal into "they are looking into it", does not guess at a number before the company supplies one, and does not tell you a fee is negotiable in the hope that it turns out to be. Where there is room to argue, and occasionally there is, this office will make the argument once, on your behalf, in writing, and then tell you what came back. What it will never do is agree to something on your behalf. No change to your reservation is made without you saying yes to the specific figure first. The company's terms govern throughout, and no sentence in this office's messages to you overrides a line in their contract.
The first hour after plans break
Write the change down and send it, before you have decided what you want to do about it. Use casement@quietquarterly.com or the form on the request form, which runs 24/7 and never closes, and put the booking reference in the first line. Whatever arrives is read by a person before the end of that working day, and a dated request sitting in the file is worth more than a tidy request sent on Thursday. If it is a same day departure problem, call (585) 240-3176 and say so in the first sentence.
Include three things and nothing else: the reference, what has changed in plain words, and which outcome you would take if you could only have one, whether that is a different date, a different traveller, or your money back as far as it goes. People often send the story and leave out the ask, and the ask is the part the operating company answers. If you are unsure what your contract says, attach it or forward the confirmation email rather than paraphrasing, because the clause that decides your case is usually the one nobody thought worth mentioning. Anything still unclear after that is covered at the questions people ask, or ask here and this office will find out.