Tour Guide: Bhutan

Senior editor Norie Quintos—currently hard at work on the annual  Tours of a Lifetime issue (May/June 2008)—is looking for deals.

You won’t find a lot of discounting in the boutique tour industry.

(Mega cruise ships and large resorts have spoiled us into thinking you should never pay rack rate.) Outfitters are typically small and operate on extremely tight margins.  Nevertheless, one company recently found a win-win way to sell some distressed inventory. Vermont-based Boundless Journeys occasionally offers up spaces on upcoming tours to the highest bidder. Explains regional manager Karen Cleary,

Last year, we found ourselves in the position of having a cabin on a small Galapagos cruise suddenly come available due to a last-minute cancellation. We decided to send out a call for bids to our relatively small e-mail distribution list. We received several bids and the couple who got it ended up saving 25 percent off the regular price.

In this industry that’s a pretty screaming deal.

Want to try it?

Boundless has a few spots open right now on a 12-day trip to Bhutan departing April 15. The retail price is $3,995 per person. All offers must be submitted to info@boundlessjourneys.com by January 25. To get on the list for future “Make Us an Offer” trips, sign up for the company’s e-newsletter.

Loyalty pays, too. Mountain Travel Sobek, for example, offers a five percent discount to clients who book back-to-back trips or who have booked three or more trips with the company. Costa Rica Expeditions invites select alumni to go on selected trips at a discount if they agree to fill out a comprehensive customer satisfaction questionnaire afterward.

And a consortium of eight luxury tour outfitters, Trusted Adventures, offers past guests of any of the seven companies a five percent discount on the first trip they take with any of the other member companies (Austin-Lehman, Wildland Adventures, ROW, EuroBike, Wayfarers, Myths and Mountains, and Western River Expeditions).

Even though many tour companies don’t officially offer discounts, it never hurts to ask, particularly if you are booking during shoulder season or can be flexible in your dates. An outfitter may want to consolidate two departures if it doesn’t get enough bookings. If you’re willing to be flexible, request a discount. ROW Adventures’ Peter Grubb admits to making rare exceptions to his no-discounting policy on Western raft trips, “in the case of someone calling less than 45 days before a shoulder-season (early spring or fall) trip that has little potential to fill up otherwise.”

Photo: Punakha Dzong, Bhutan. Boundless Journeys.