Booking and Payment Explained: Confirmations, Changes and Cancellations

A Farbound journey is confirmed when three things have happened: you have approved the itinerary and quote in writing, payment has been received, and we have issued written confirmation. Until all three are done, nothing is held. Once they are done, we start putting money into hotels, transport, guides, permits and timed entries on your behalf, and much of it stops being available to refund from that moment.

That sequence is the whole of it, and everything below is detail hanging off it. The reason it is worth publishing rather than leaving in a terms page is that the commercial mechanics of private travel in South Asia work differently from booking a hotel or a flight, and it is fairer to explain them before you are choosing between two proposals than after.

This page covers the timeline from enquiry to departure, what payment involves, what you can get back and when, and what happens when something changes on either side. The full legal position lives on our refund and cancellation page, and where the two differ, that page and your invoice govern.

What happens between enquiry and confirmation

The planning stage is deliberately unhurried and costs nothing.

You send an enquiry with your dates, the places drawing you in and how you like to travel. We reply within one business day, usually with questions rather than a document, because a proposal built before we understand pace and hotel expectations is a proposal built twice. A trip designer then tests the route against season, geography, drive times and hotel locations before the first proposal reaches you.

The proposal arrives with the route laid out day by day, named hotels with room categories, what is included, what is not, and the price per person on your intended occupancy. From there you change what you want changed. Most trips go through two or three rounds. People upgrade a stay, remove a city, add a day somewhere, move the whole thing three weeks later for a festival. None of this commits you to anything.

When the itinerary is right, you approve it in writing. That written approval is the point at which the trip stops being a conversation and becomes a booking.

What "confirmed" actually means

Confirmation is a specific event, not a feeling, and it is worth being precise because the word gets used loosely across the industry.

A journey is confirmed once the itinerary and quote are approved in writing, payment is received, and Farbound issues written confirmation. All three. An approved itinerary on its own is not a confirmed trip and nothing is held against your dates. This matters most in peak season and around festivals, when the hotels people want are the hotels everyone wants, and the gap between approval and payment is exactly the window in which a room can go.

Once confirmation is issued, we begin securing the components: hotels, transport, guides, any included flights, permits, restricted-area permissions and timed entries. Some of these are instant. Some take days, particularly park allocations and permits that are issued by a government department on its own schedule. You receive documentation as things land rather than in one final packet at the end.

There is a distinction worth holding onto here. Your booking with us being confirmed and every individual hotel being confirmed are two different states, and the second one follows the first over a period of days. If a specific hotel cannot be secured after confirmation, which happens occasionally, we tell you and propose a replacement of the same standard rather than quietly downgrading the line item.

How payment works

Farbound accepts Visa, Mastercard, American Express and bank transfer. Checkout defaults to US dollars, though in most cases you can choose to pay in your own local currency instead. The currency selector on the site changes the display only, so a price you read in pounds or euros is a conversion for reference, and the currency you are actually charged in is confirmed at the point of payment.

Two practical notes. Bank transfers from some countries take three to five working days to clear, which matters if your dates are close and something in the itinerary is time-sensitive. And the receiving account is in the name Farbound Travels LLP, which is the same name that appears on your invoice and on our company registration in New Delhi. If a travel company ever asks you to pay an account in a different name from the entity on the invoice, that is worth stopping over, with us or anyone else.

Payment processing fees and bank charges apply as your card network or bank sets them, and where we cannot get them back from a supplier, they are deducted from any refund. Indian GST is applied according to law and the structure of your invoice. Neither of these is a Farbound decision, and we would rather set them out here than have you discover them at the wrong moment.

When a deposit applies, and when it doesn't

Farbound runs a deposit model for most bookings, but it depends on how far out your departure date is. If you book four months or more before departure, a deposit of fifty per cent confirms the journey, with the remaining balance due within the ninety-day window before departure. Book inside four months of departure, and we ask for full payment upfront, since prices and supplier allocations need to be locked in immediately at that point rather than held against a partial commitment.

The reason for this structure is how we pre-pay suppliers. Heritage hotels in peak season, park permits, restricted-area permissions and domestic flights are largely paid at the point of booking rather than on arrival, and a good number of them are non-refundable from that moment. Booking further out gives enough runway to hold a journey on a deposit while the balance is collected as departure approaches. Inside ninety days of departure, that runway is gone, which is why the trip price is generally paid in full by then regardless of when you first booked.

Two things follow from this that are worth knowing. If your travel dates are a long way out, ask us for the exact deposit and balance schedule for your route and season, since it can vary. And if you are booking through a travel advisor, your advisor's own terms with you sit alongside ours, so ask them how the two interact.

What you can get back, and when

Refunds in this business are governed by how far your payment has already moved to suppliers, not by a percentage grid, and any operator here who publishes a neat sliding scale is either absorbing the difference themselves or about to disappoint someone.

The principle is straightforward. We refund the portion of your trip price that suppliers haven't yet been paid, plus whatever we can claw back under their own cancellation terms, minus any costs already incurred that can't be reversed.

In practice that produces two periods. More than ninety days before day one, some of the trip is still unpaid to suppliers or claimable back, so there is usually something to return, though how much depends entirely on how far the booking has progressed. Inside ninety days, most of the trip price has already gone to suppliers and is generally non-refundable. If we do get anything back from a supplier after a cancellation, we pass it on to you net of costs.

Separately, some items carry strict supplier terms from the moment they are booked, whatever the date. Domestic flights and any in-itinerary international sectors. Wildlife safaris and park fees. Permits and restricted-area permissions. Charters and special access. Festival and event tickets. Strict-term hotels and peak-season allocations. We flag these in the proposal or confirmation where we can, so you know which parts of your trip are firm the moment they are booked.

This is the clearest argument for travel insurance, which we recommend and do not sell. Buy it at the point of booking rather than later, since most policies only cover cancellation causes that arise after the policy starts.

Changing your trip after you've booked

Changes are normal and we handle them case by case rather than by rule.

Date and route changes depend on what suppliers will allow. Where they permit an amendment, you pay the revised supplier cost, any fare difference on flights, and any already-spent costs that can't be recovered. Where they will not, the change has to be treated as a cancellation and a rebooking, and the refund principle above applies. This is why an early conversation about a wobbling date is worth far more than a late one.

Name changes split into two cases. Minor spelling corrections are usually straightforward. Substituting one traveller for another depends on supplier rules, permit rules and flight ticket rules, and some components simply cannot be transferred, particularly anything permit-based.

Upgrades and additions are usually possible while you are still in planning and often possible after confirmation, with the price adjusted accordingly. Some of them, certain hotels, special access, safari allocations, require immediate commitment and become non-refundable as soon as they are secured. We say so at the point you ask rather than in a note at the bottom of the revised invoice.

If something goes wrong on our side

If we cancel a trip for our own operational reasons, you get the choice: rebook to new dates or an alternative itinerary, or take a refund of what you have paid for the affected services, subject to what has already gone to suppliers and can be recovered.

Force majeure is different, and honest operators say so. Government restrictions, natural disasters, widespread disruption, security incidents, strikes and supplier shutdowns are outside anyone's control, and in those situations we prioritise rebooking and route adjustment over refunds, because rebooking is the outcome we can actually influence and a refund is limited to what suppliers release. Our regional teams across India, Nepal and Bhutan exist partly for this: a closed road or a cancelled internal flight is re-planned on the ground, in real time, rather than referred back to an office in another time zone.

Two smaller cases worth naming. If you miss a service through a late arrival, a no-show, or incomplete documents such as a visa or permit, that service is not refundable. And if your invoice or confirmation states stricter terms for a particular component than this page describes, those stricter terms govern that component, because they come from the supplier rather than from us.

To cancel or change anything, email support@farboundtravels.com with your booking reference and lead traveller name. We acknowledge within one business day, start supplier recovery checks immediately, and confirm any refund figure only once suppliers have responded, since quoting you a number before that would be a guess.

If you are ready to start planning, tell us how you travel