Four stacks of folded sheets and blankets of different thicknesses on a shelf.

nights, moves and what each one costs

Vacation Package Cost: What the Figure Is Made Of

Vacation package cost here breaks into two things and only two: what a night costs, and what a move costs. This page opens both.

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Two numbers, not one

Every figure on this site is the sum of nights and moves. The nights are rooms, meals and whatever is included in the day. The moves are transfers, trains, ferries, internal flights and the hours that go with them.

Splitting the two is the useful part, because they behave in opposite directions. Nights get cheaper the longer you stay in one place. Moves get more expensive the more of them there are, and they also cost you time, which never appears on an invoice.

What a night buys, on every trip here

The room: Each night the page counts, at the standard the page names, with the bed described rather than implied
What you eat: Counted meal by meal, never hidden behind a phrase like half board
The day: Any guided time, counted in hours, since a phrase like half a day means something different at every firm that uses it
The entries: Named individually. On three of these trips they are a large slice of the whole figure
Somebody at this end: One person on your file, in writing, from the first question to the last night

What a move costs, and it is not only money

The transfer itself: Priced and timed, door to door, on every trip page
The morning it eats: A move day is rarely a sightseeing day, and the trip pages say how many of your days are move days
The bag: Carried by you, moved for you, or never moved. This changes what the trip is like more than most people expect
The threshold: On the touring trips, cutting one move out of the route usually saves more than any seasonal reduction gives back

What sits outside every figure

Getting to the country: Priced on its own once your dates are settled, because a figure typed today is wrong next week
Meals the page does not count: Deliberately, on the trips where eating where you like is the point
Anything from a pharmacy: Vaccinations, tablets, altitude medicine
Getting across a border: Yours to arrange and yours to confirm
Cover for the trip: Not arranged here, not sold here, and not advised on
Tips: Named on each page that expects them, with a number attached

What this desk adds

Not a cent, ever, in either direction. The opening conversation is free, so is the digging, so is placing the booking, and so is the fourth rebuild after your dates slip twice.

What pays for the work is a slice of the operator's margin, released once you are back. Follow that through and something useful falls out: an expensive cabin earns this desk exactly what a modest one earns, so nothing sits behind a suggestion except the suggestion itself.

Whose account the money enters

Each supplier's, directly. This website runs no checkout, keeps no card and has no field anywhere that would accept one. Your documents and your receipt come from them, and their rules decide what happens if the trip is called off. The page on vacation package refunds sets that out in full.

Nothing on this site is run by the company that sells it. Thistle Crossing puts trips together and hands them to the airlines, hotels, ships, rail companies and tour operators whose job it is to carry them out. Not one bed, one seat, one hull or one guide belongs to this company. The firm doing the carrying is named on your written proposal, works to rules it wrote itself, and bills you without this desk touching the money.

Which rules a few things out, and they are worth stating rather than implying. Nobody here flies anything, sails anything or lets a room. No department of any government has appointed, approved or endorsed this firm, and no page claims otherwise. Cover for your trip is somebody else's business and so is the paperwork that gets you over a border. There is no way to pay through these pages and no card number is ever stored.