twenty eight dated trips, laid across one calendar year
Reserve a dated trip with a travel agent in Orlando, one of twenty eight windows that open and close on fixed dates
Roving Hours books twenty eight dated trips, from $3,061 to $6,939 per person, and each one runs inside a window with a first date and a last date, because the thing it is built around happens then. The catalogue is drawn as a twelve month strip with every trip as a bar across the weeks it runs, so the question of when you can actually get away is settled before anything else. The operating company bills you directly and pays Roving Hours Bookings LLC a commission once you are home. The form on this page stays open every hour of every day.
Reserve a windowAn answer is written inside one business day by somebody at this end.
Twenty eight trips are open for booking here, from $3,061 to $6,939 per person, and every one of them is sold as a window with a first date and a last date on it. You reserve a dated trip with a travel agent in Orlando, and what arrives is a block of nights placed inside the weeks when the thing you are going for is happening: an olive pressing that runs day and night for six weeks, drift ice that comes down from the north and then leaves, forty minutes of birds over a reed bed before they go down into it.
Some of those windows are eleven days wide and some are five weeks wide. That difference is the most useful single fact about any trip on this site, so it is the first thing the catalogue shows you.
Each bar is the window that trip runs in. A wide bar is a long season and easy to fit around; a narrow one is a few days and needs more notice. Figures are starting points for two people sharing and exclude the flight. Dates move a little from year to year and the page for each window says by how much.
Pick the week first, the country second
A catalogue sorted by place asks you to fall for somewhere and only afterward find out that the reason for going was over in April. This one is twelve months of bars. Every trip is drawn across the weeks it actually runs, so reading along a bar tells you how much room a window leaves you, and reading down a single week tells you what stands open in it. Somebody with ten days of leave in early March can put a finger on early March and see the whole answer at once.
That ordering settles the question people really arrive with. When can I travel is normally the last thing a booking gets round to, after the pictures and the figure and the day by day, and it is the one thing that can end a trip outright. Here it is dealt with in the first minute. the whole year laid out in one strip is the full year in one view, and what is open in the weeks you can travel takes any single month and sets out what its weeks hold.
Widths differ for reasons that belong to the trip rather than to us. A pressing season stays long while fruit keeps arriving at the mill. A murmuration window depends on a flock building up and later coming apart. Ice arrives when wind and current bring it and clears when they stop. Roving Hours Bookings LLC reserves your nights against the dated list each operating company sets for the coming season, rather than against a tidy calendar, so an early or late season moves your dates instead of ending the arrangement.
None of this is underwritten by anybody. A wild flock, a flowering and a night sky answer to no company, and every trip page states what is typical, how often it falls short and what you still get on the quiet days.
Four marks, four kinds of day
Every trip carries a mark from one to four, and the mark says how much of your day the trip actually uses. One means a single fixed hour: you stand in a particular place at a particular time and the rest of the twenty four is yours. Two is a morning or an evening, so half the day is programmed. Three is most of the daylight. Four runs from before dawn until after dark, which is what a night watch or a full crossing on foot asks of you.
For some readers that mark matters more than the figure. A one costs you almost no freedom and can still be the whole reason for the journey. A four is nearer to work than to a rest and deserves reading twice before anyone commits to it. The mark sits beside the price on every trip in the catalogue and beside every bar on the strip.
The widest window in the catalogue
Southern Tasmania
Runs April 12 to September 28.
26 weeks wide. A window this long fits around a job, a school term and somebody else's diary, and it can be moved a month without losing the thing you came for.
8 nights, from $4,127 per person.
The narrowest
The Sarawak highlands
Runs June 13 to June 26.
1 week wide, and it does not move. Miss it and the next chance is a year away, which is why a window this tight gets asked about early and decided calmly rather than hurried.
10 nights, from $3,061 per person.
First to open in the year
The Okhotsk coast, Hokkaido
Runs January 25 to March 15.
Nothing in the catalogue opens before this one, so it is the window people ask about while the year is still notional and every other date is still free.
8 nights, from $4,505 per person.
Last to close
Northern Kerala
Runs early December to the last week of March.
The final window of the year, and the one most often chosen by people who have already used their leave and are looking at what is left rather than at what they wanted.
11 nights, from $5,116 per person.
Pricing a flight to the window yourself
The trips on this page are priced without flights in them, because a fare to the same fortnight can differ by more than the trip does. The box below asks a booking company for that figure directly, and while the dates are being typed it does the arithmetic this catalogue is built on: it names the week of the year those dates fall in and lists the windows open across it.
Pressing that button hands the six figures above to a booking company reached through a host this domain lends its name to, and the answer that comes back is theirs. Their prices move minute by minute and are settled on their own pages, under their own conditions, against a card this website has nowhere to put. Whatever they pay this office afterwards was fixed with them long before you arrived and is taken out of their side, so the sum in front of you is the sum either way. What leaves this page, and what is only reckoned here.
Who bills you and who answers for the days
Roving Hours is a small independent booking office in Orlando, Orange, Florida. Behind every window there is a separate operating company that holds the vehicles, the rooms, the guides and the permits for those dates, and that company is answerable for how the days run and for what it charges.
Money moves one way and this office stands outside it. The operating company invoices you on its own paper under its own terms, you settle with that company, and it pays a commission here once you are back. Nothing at all is collected at this end, no card number is asked for or held anywhere on this site, and the figures printed beside each window are the operating company's own figures for those dates. If something on a quote is wrong, write to corrections@rovinghours.com and the operator will send a corrected one.
Two things remain yours on every trip. The flight is your own arrangement, bought wherever you choose, because this office arranges no air travel and sells no ticket of any kind. Where a window involves crossing water, that passage is held by the operating company under its own licence and appears on the operator's invoice.
Sending the first message
Tell Roving Hours Bookings LLC which window you are looking at, how many people are travelling and how much room your dates have either side. That is enough to start. how a request becomes a held window sets out the sequence from that first message through to a held reservation, and request a trip quote 24/7 is the form itself.
The form stays open every hour of every day of the year. What it collects is a request and not a reservation, a person reads it, and an answer is written within one business day.
Pricing a specific set of nights takes two to four working days after that, because your dates are checked against the operating company's list for the season before a figure goes back to you, rather than afterward.
Cancellation terms belong to the operating company and differ from one window to the next; the terms for ending a booking early explains how those terms reach you and what this office does about them on your behalf. what gets asked most often before people commit answers the rest, including several things this office will not take on at all.
One habit worth stating plainly: this office answers what it is sent and begins nothing on its own. It places no calls to travellers and sends no text messages, so every reply comes back on whichever channel you opened. Write to bookings@rovinghours.com or use the form below, and you can reach Roving Hours Bookings LLC by telephone at +1 (407) 629-3157 if you would rather talk it through. Florida Department of State
Who writes back, and from what address
Roving Hours Bookings LLC1350 N. Orange Avenue, Suite 221Winter Park, FL 32789+1 (407) 629-3157bookings@rovinghours.comServing travellers across Winter Park and Orange County. No opening times are posted here and none are kept back: an answer is written within one business day, and this company rings nobody and texts nobody first.
Start with the weeks, not the country
This form takes requests every hour of every day, and a person answers within one business day. Nothing here commits you. No figure is charged at this end.