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Dear Friends,
These are certainly unusual days we are all dealing with. We hope you’re staying healthy and well. We are sad to announce that due to numerous cancellations by clients and low numbers for our trips we were still planning to take to Arkansas, Yellowstone, and Canadian Rockies, we have cancelled all of our group tours through the end of July. We are still hopeful that our tour to Nova Scotia at the end of August will still go, along with our fall motor coach tours. If you purchased travel insurance through us, you do not need to contact the insurance company. We will submit a list of clients with travel insurance for each tour to Allianz requesting that your premiums be refunded. Please be aware that due to the volume of refunds that everyone in the travel industry is dealing with along with limited staffing challenges, there could be longer delays than normal. This includes the insurance company as well as our office. It is realistic to expect your refund within 30 to 60 days and not before. This is not our normal mode of operation and we apologize for the inconvenience but unfortunately, these are not normal times we are working in. Changes in Travel The health and safety of our clients is our top priority. As the country works towards restarting the economy and people begin traveling again, we wanted you to know of the extra precautions and policies we are implementing for these first trips on the road after the stay-at-home orders are lifted, until further notice.
How we are handling final payment deadlines and cancellations: If you change your mind about a trip, you must cancel before the final payment deadline in order to receive a refund. If you cancel after the final payment deadline, you must have travel insurance to receive a refund - and the cancellation reason must be a covered reason by the insurance company. If you are traveling with us, please go ahead and send in your final payment by your tour's final payment deadline. We will hold your payment until 30 days before the tour when we will make our final decision on whether the trip will still go. As more areas open up and restrictions are loosened, this may change in the fall. Insurance and cancellations: Should we as an agency decide to cancel the trip and you have not already cancelled with us, you will receive a full refund and we will request that the insurance company return your insurance premium. PLEASE NOTE: if you cancel your reservation after the final payment deadline but before our agency cancels a tour, you will have to file an insurance claim in order to receive a refund, and you will not be eligible to get your insurance premium back. If you do not purchase insurance and cancel after the final payment deadline, you will not receive a refund. In the past, we have made many exceptions for clients who found themselves in this situation, but we are unable to do this going forward. You are strongly encouraged to purchase travel insurance. We hope these additional steps will help alleviate concerns you may have for traveling as we look towards departing for our fall tours. Of course, all of our tours are contingent upon state and federal government guidelines, and a decrease in COVID-19 cases. We will be in touch with any updates or changes as we get closer to our tours departing. Please submit your travel liability and travel insurance waivers (enclosed) with your final payments which you will receive in the mail from us as we get closer to each tour. We must have these on file in order for you to travel with us. You may mail them, or scan them and email them if your payment has already been made. Thank you for your business. As always, if you have any questions or concerns, you can contact us at the office at 225.654.9210 during our limited office hours from 9am-12 noon Monday through Friday or by email at [email protected]. National Travel and Tourism Week is May 3-9 this year, and as you might imagine, this year feels a little different. While we're still celebrating love of travel and the #SpiritOfTravel, most of us are, in fact, not traveling at the moment thanks to COVID-19. We miss our clients and we miss traveling. This pandemic has hit the travel industry and everyone who works in it in painfully hard ways, and it’s been hard to put our feelings and our experience as an agency into words when we know so many other industries and businesses have been impacted as well. But we can’t offer curbside delivery. We can't offer "trips to go", though the thought is funny to think about, in a wry, ironic sort of way. We can’t sell products online, because what we sell isn't really a product. We sell experiences. We get people going. We get people moving. We help people discover all of the wonderful places and history and food and stories this amazing world offers. So when the world goes still, so does travel. But we will come back, and our tours will resume and our personal trip planning for families and individuals will start up once again. And when that time comes, we hope you’ll consider supporting us the way you (and we) have supported other small businesses during this time. Don’t book that flight online - let us do it for you. Instead of that Air BnB (which doesn’t work with travel agencies), let us find a great beach house or condo for you. Let us plan your first family road trip back out, and book your hotels. Let us do the booking for your next Disney or Universal trip. Get together with your friends and sign up for one of our group tours and leave all of the planning to us. No, you won’t always get “a deal” when you use a travel agency. You won’t always get cheaper. But cheaper isn’t always better when it comes to travel. “You get what you pay for” can sometimes ring really true, and you won’t get “cheap” with us because we don’t sell cheap trips. We won’t book you in substandard hotels or put you with subpar tour operators. Remember, we sell experiences and we want your experience to be amazing. So… you won’t get “cheap” with us. What you will get is amazing value. And you will get excellent service. You will get people who love travel and love helping people travel and have the resources and experience to help you plan an amazing trip. You will get people who remember you, who know you by name, who learn what you like and what you don’t like, and who will go above and beyond when something doesn’t go right and a flight gets delayed or a hotel gives you problems or a cruise gets canceled. We are the ones who will be on the phone at 10pm on a Saturday when your international flight gets canceled and you just want to get home. We are the ones on the phone navigating all of the rescheduling with airlines and hotels and tour operators when your first flight gets delayed and threatens to completely mess up your entire vacation. We are the ones who will get up at 6am to book those Disney fast passes for you while you get your child ready for their first day of school. We are the ones ready to answer all of your questions no matter how many you have, and if we don’t know the answer, we will find out. We aren’t just in the travel business. We’re in the people business. And we’re looking forward to being with our people again very soon. Happy National Travel Week! Let's plan a trip! #ShopLocal #SupportSmallBusiness #UseATravelAdvisor #UseZacharyTravel  |
About ZTCZachary Travel is a full-service travel agency that's served the travel needs of Zachary, Baton Rouge, and clients in Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and beyond for almost 40 years. Contact us at 225.654.9210 or email us at [email protected]. Archives
April 2024
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