Reserve a vacation package with an independent travel agent in the Kansas City metro

This office publishes nothing, carries nobody and routes no calls for anybody: it is not a publisher, not a newspaper, not a carrier and not a broker of transport, and not an emergency or call routing service. Third Coast Dispatch Bookings LLC is a small booking office in the Kansas City metro, and the whole of its business is one transaction: you reserve a vacation package with an independent travel agent, and the agent places that reservation with the company that operates the trip. Twenty-six departures are open across the year, each attached to fixed dates rather than to a season. Prices run from $1,615 to $4,855 per person, and the whole year is laid out on every departure on the board.

Who invoices you, and when

Money is paid to this office at no point in the sequence. Once the operating company confirms your place on a departure, it invoices you in its own name and on its own terms, and it collects from you directly. A card number is not asked for here, not held here and not handed on by anyone here.

This office is paid afterward, and only by the operator: a commission arrives some weeks after you are back home, once the operator has closed out that departure and reconciled it. The order matters to a reader. Nothing is earned by talking somebody into a departure they will back out of, and nothing is earned at all until the trip has actually happened.

What belongs to whom

Aircraft belong to airlines. Guest rooms belong to whoever owns the building they sit in. Where a departure crosses open water, that passage is held by the company licensed to carry passengers over it, under that company's own certificate and in that company's own name. The ground program, the vehicles, the guides and the running order belong to the operator who assembles them. Inventory screens belong to the online booking sites that maintain them.

Third Coast Dispatch Bookings LLC owns no piece of any of it. It holds a stake in no airline, no hotel or hotel group, no ferry or cruise line, no tour operator and no online booking site. It carries an endorsement from none of them, speaks for none of them, and has been appointed the representative of none of them. Every page on this site was written at this office, and nobody in that list approved a word of it.

Getting yourself to the start of a departure is your own arrangement, made wherever you prefer to make it. The figures on the board cover what the operator delivers once you are there, and each entry says so in the same words.

A booking office, not a publication

This is a booking office and not a publication. Nothing here is reported, scored, graded or ranked; no column carries an opinion, and no page sets one departure above another. What the pages hold instead is a date, a price band, a length, what the operator includes, what it leaves to you, and a form. That is the entire inventory of the site.

Twenty-six dates, and the months they leave in

The board is built around departure dates, because the date is the fact a traveller has to arrange the rest of a year around. Some entries run once, on a single date, and once that date is gone the entry waits eleven months. Some carry several starts inside one week. Some repeat weekly through one named month and stop. A few stay open across most of the year. Cutting the same twenty-six entries by when they leave is usually the faster way in, and that view is what each month of the year holds.

One place can appear twice in the year at two prices, and the second row is not a duplicate. A departure in a slow month buys a different number of nights, a different room grade and a different operator cost than the same coastline in the weeks everybody wants. Both rows stay on the board with their own dates and their own figure, so the difference is visible before you ask for anything.

From a form to a confirmed place

You send the form with a departure and a date on it. This office puts that to the operator, gets the current price and the remaining places, and writes back within one business day with what came back, in writing, including anything that has moved since the row was last checked. The reservation is made only after you say yes to a specific figure on a specific date. The order of events is set out on the sequence from a note to a booking, what happens if you step away is on the terms for moving or cancelling, and the questions that come up most often are answered on the questions people actually ask. If a figure is where you want to start, begin at what to put in a request.

Where the office sits

Third Coast Dispatch Bookings LLC keeps one office at 600 SW Jefferson St, Suite 302 in Lee's Summit, MO, on the Missouri side of the state line that runs through the middle of this metro, and it is registered as a limited liability company with the Missouri Secretary of State. Third Coast Dispatch is the name Third Coast Dispatch Bookings LLC operates under, and the two refer to the same company. Correspondence, requests and corrections all arrive at the same counter and are handled by the same people.

You will not find a schedule of counter times anywhere on this site, and that is deliberate. Printing one would be undertaking that a particular person is in a particular chair at a particular hour, which is not something a one-room agency can honour every week of the year. The undertaking given instead is about turnaround. Whatever arrives through the form is opened in the order it landed, an answer goes back inside one working day, and on the occasions when an answer needs longer than that you are told so, and told what it is waiting on, before the day is out.

If something on a page has gone stale, a wrong date, a figure the operator has since moved, a length that reads short, send it to corrections@thirdcoastdispatch.com and it gets checked against the operator's own paperwork and put right. Otherwise, give the form a departure and a date, and the answer comes back in writing.