You can call a travel agent in Lincoln on a working day and get a person who has the twenty-four trips in front of them. What that person cannot do on the telephone is quote you a figure priced against your dates, because two operating companies have to answer before the number is real. Spoken questions are for the things a written page is bad at: whether the walking on a given trip is a problem for your knee, whether a family of five fits the rooms, whether the order at all five orderings is hiding something you should know before you shortlist.
The three ways in
- (402) 488-6215
- Spoken questions, a working day. Nobody at this number can take a card, and nobody will ask you for one.
- sightline@amberalmanac.com
- Booking requests and anything with dates in it. This is the address the desk works from and the one that produces a written figure.
- errata@amberalmanac.com
- Corrections. A price that reads wrong, a distance that does not match the map, a broken link, a sentence that promises something this office does not do.
Pick the middle one if you want a figure. A booking request in writing carries the two things a telephone call loses on the way to the operating company: exact dates and exact numbers of people. Somebody here reads what arrives before that working day ends, and if the request is missing something that would stall it, you hear about the gap first rather than waiting opened by somebody here before that working day is out for a question you could have answered in a line. The form at the form for a written figure asks for the same information in a shape that is hard to get wrong, and the sequence it starts is set out at the sequence from ask to booked.
Nothing leaves this office uninvited
Everything here runs one direction: you start it, and it stops when you stop it. No one at this desk dials out. This office does not buy lists, does not rent them, does not swap them with anybody and does not keep a standing list of its own to send things to. Reading a page here, filling in a form here, or calling once about a trip you decided against does not put you anywhere that generates a later call. If you write and then go quiet, that is the end of it, and you will not be chased.
Which makes the following easy to state. A caller who says they are from Amber Almanac, and who rings you first, is not from Amber Almanac. Neither is anyone who asks you for a card number, a bank detail or a payment of any kind in this office's name, because this office never handles either: the company that operates your trip bills you directly, under its own terms, on its own paperwork. If a call like that reaches you, errata@amberalmanac.com is the address for it, and the desk would rather hear about it twice than not at all.
The room this office occupies
6940 O Street, Suite 210, Lincoln, NE 68510. The legal entity behind the brand printed on this site is Amber Almanac Bookings LLC, the Nebraska Secretary of State, and the same name appears on every page of it.
The office is a booking desk and nothing else. It arranges reservations with the companies that run the trips, and it is paid a commission by those companies after you have travelled and come home. That is the whole of the money side, and it is worth knowing when you read anything here, including which of the five orders a trip appears in. This office does not sell travel insurance, does not sell or advise on visas, passports or entry documents, and gives no medical or legal advice. Those belong to people qualified to give them, and questions about them are the one class of question that comes back with an honest nothing rather than an answer.
Post reaches the address above. It is the slowest way in by a wide margin and is worth using only for something that has to exist on paper.
What a reply takes, honestly
Attendance times are not printed anywhere on this site. What a doorplate tells you is whether somebody is sitting down at this exact minute, which is hardly ever the question; the useful one is how long the gap runs between sending something and receiving something you can act on. Put plainly: nothing closes the request form, at any hour of any week; anything arriving in it gets opened by somebody here before that working day is out; and turning your particular dates into a figure adds a further two to four working days, because it waits on two separate operating firms replying. None of those numbers has been trimmed to flatter this desk.
The two-to-four working day figure for a written quote is not padding. A dated request goes out to the operating company that runs the trip, and often to a second one that holds the rooms or the seats on the ground, and this office cannot make either of them answer faster. When they both come back, you get a figure with the date it was priced on and a plain list of what is inside it and what is not. Prices on this site start at $1,920 per person and run to $3,940, but a starting figure and a quote are different animals: the first is what the trip has cost people at its quietest, the second is what your dates cost.
Three things make a reply slow, and all three are avoidable. Dates given as a month rather than as days, which means the desk has to ask. A party described as a couple plus family, which means the desk has to ask. And a shortlist of six trips at once, which means six sets of questions to two operating companies each. Two named trips with real dates on them come back fastest.
If the answer changes after it has been sent, you are told. A figure that has moved, a departure the operator has pulled, a room type that turns out not to exist in the size you need: this office writes to you about it rather than letting you find out later. What happens to a reservation you want out of is set out at the terms for changing or cancelling, and the questions people ask most often before they commit to anything are collected at the questions put to this desk.
