How Payment Works When You Book With Us

A lot of trekking bookings work on a deposit-now, balance-later basis, which means a second payment to track weeks or months after you've mentally moved on. This site works differently, and it's worth understanding the flow before you click "Reserve your place" on a departure.

One payment, made at booking

When you reserve a seat on a departure, the full trip price for every traveller on the booking is charged in a single payment during checkout — there's no deposit and no remaining balance to pay later. What you see on the checkout page is the total amount that will be charged, in full, right then.

The step-by-step flow

1. Pick a departure date on the trip page and choose how many people are travelling, then submit the booking form.
2. This places a short-lived hold on those seats — long enough for you to complete traveller details and payment, but not indefinitely, so a departure with limited spots isn't tied up by an abandoned checkout.
3. You'll land on the checkout page with a countdown showing how long your hold is valid, the price breakdown, and a Traveller Information section to fill in for everyone on the booking.
4. Enter payment details and submit. Payment is processed securely; card details are never stored in your account.
5. On success, your seats are permanently booked immediately — not pending, not "awaiting confirmation" — and you're taken straight to a confirmation page.

If the hold expires or payment fails

If you don't complete payment before the countdown runs out, the hold is released automatically and those seats go back into general availability — nothing is charged, and nothing needs to be cancelled on your end. The same is true if a payment attempt is declined: the hold is released and you're free to try again or pick a different date. This is deliberate — it's what keeps seat counts across the site accurate in real time instead of quietly held by abandoned carts.

After you've paid

Your confirmation page gives you real, downloadable documents straight away: a booking confirmation, an invoice, and a full trip itinerary, each generated from your actual booking rather than a generic template. You can find these again any time from My Bookings in your account.

Adding or removing travellers before you pay

If you need to add or remove a traveller while you're still on the checkout page — before payment — you can adjust the seat count directly from the Traveller Information section, and the total updates automatically. Once a booking is confirmed and paid, changes to the traveller count go through our team directly rather than through the checkout page, since seats have already been permanently allocated.

A note on trying to book twice

If you already hold a confirmed, paid booking on a specific departure, the site won't let you accidentally book — and pay for — the same date again. You'll see an "already booked" notice on that departure instead, linking straight to your existing booking.