Booking Process – How to Book

The Booking Process for a Croatia Cruise or Croatia Tour

Have a look around our website using the Menus, or the keyword search feature on the home page. If you are looking for a particular ship name you can enter the ship name as the keyword or you can look on our Ship Descriptions page or use the drop down ‘Ships’ menu to find it.

When you find something you like, look for the redClick for pricing / availability box or go to the ‘Prices and Dates‘ tab to see the prices and sold out status (a pop up window will open, so please ensure you allow pop ups for this site).  If a cruise or tour is fully booked, it will say ‘Sold out’ on our website next to the price. We only close off cruises and tours when we are 100% sure that departure is full, so occasionally departures will look like they are available, but might still be fully booked anyway. This is due to the large time difference with Croatia, and options being held for other passengers, which haven’t yet been fully confirmed. If an option is held for another passenger it’s not yet ‘sold’, but also not ‘available’ unless and until that passenger decides not to book and releases their option.

When you are ready to book, you can then click the ‘On Request’ link, and add your details, or go back one screen and click on the dark grey ‘Make an enquiry‘ box at the top right for that product and send us your details (including everyone’s name please). No payment will be taken yet, and we will email you with all the details before any payment is required.

Info panel on product listings

Once we have received your Request, we then need to double-check on true actual availability. All cruises and most tours need to be manually double-checked with Croatia (an overnight or longer process due to the time difference). As Croatian offices don’t work on weekends this can take 3 or 4 days over a weekend. 

We do our absolute best to keep the website as up to date as we can, but 100% accuracy is not possible due to all the variables. As the small ship cruises only have around 20 cabins on each ship,  the available cabins can change rapidly overnight and even from hour to hour as options go on and off hold and cabins get booked and go off sale.

We will get back to you, usually within 1 business day with a Provisional Booking email (provided your choice is available). We will let you know as soon as we hear back. (Please note, Croatian booking offices are closed during weekends and holidays).

It does not cost you anything to hold an obligation-free option for the Provisional Booking, all it does is give you a few days to make your decision and know that your choice is on hold for you should you decide to go ahead. If you do not take up the option, it simply lapses automatically on the expiry date and the room or cabin goes back on public sale.

For Escorted Tours with guaranteed departures, we’ll also double check to confirm availability and get back to you with a Provisional Booking.

As the booking situation for Cruises is so volatile, especially with last minute bookings, we do not send ‘quotes’ for cruises. Our prices are available on our website. If there’s no prices, that means the cruise is sold out for this year, and/or has no prices / departures set yet for the next year. When you are certain you are ready to book, we will check on availability and ask for an option to be held in your name. We cannot offer you a cruise unless we know a cabin is being held for you specifically, in your name. That means we need to wait til not only the end of the Australian business day, but also the end of the Croatian business day for a reply (around 1-2am Sydney-time). We will get back to you the next day. Thank you for your understanding and patience.

Once we’ve confirmed availability and held an option for you, we’ll then send you a Provisional Booking (with an expiry date noted). We will need to receive payment from you before the expiry date if you wish to proceed (or full payment for certain bookings e.g. if it’s within 90 days of start date or a special offer etc).

Deposits are minimum 20-40% per person for land tours and small ship cruises. Some products such as mini-cruises and day tours require full payment upon booking. Other products such as charters and private tours require up to 100% deposit. Your Provisional Booking will have the details.

Then we Confirm your booking with the local supplier (this might take another 24hrs). We will then email you again with a Booking Confirmation after they get back to us once it’s all double-checked one final time. Until this time, please do not make travel arrangements such as flights or ferries in case there has been an issue such as the option lapsed, or your payment has been delayed or some other small problem. Please check our full Terms and Conditions here.

Payment details are on your Provisional Booking email, and payment can be made securely online with credit card, or by EFT / direct deposit into our bank account. Please note that EFT deposit can take up to 3 working days to show in our account if you send from a small credit union or overseas. Please keep the Provisional Booking expiry date in mind when paying by EFT. If you pay and the option has expired and the product is no longer available and we cannot find a replacement product for you, we will refund you in full.

Our Island Hopping Tours (multi-day independent tours) are usually always available and depart every day of the week from May to October, so we can book those last minute for you, even just a few weeks ahead.

We can also take your booking over the phone or by email, and sometimes it’s best just to have a quick chat first to ensure that your expectations for your holiday match the reality of what is on offer.

Please call us in Australia on 1300 660 189 or +612-9212-1507 or from abroad you can call/text us on WhatsApp +612-9212-1507 (and please leave your email address in the message if you are in a different time zone so that we can contact you out of hours), or email us at [email protected].

You can also use our simple Contact page here.

If you are not in Australia, please make a note of your available contact times as sometimes we can’t tell your time zone from your phone number or email address and we don’t want to wake you if we text or call. Please also type in the full number including the area code and country code and whether it’s a mobile number or landline. Thank you.

Our business hours generally are from 11am-7pm Monday-Friday (Australian Eastern Standard Time). This allows us to work for a portion of both the Australian and Croatian business day, which means you can get your requests answered faster.

We mostly work in GMT/UTC+10 time zone (+11 in daylight savings time), and though are hours can be varied in high season, often this means that some other time zones (particularly USA Eastern Time) are hard to connect with during both our respective business times. Please, send us an email or your WhatsApp number so that we can communicate with you easily irrespective of time zones. Thank you. We are happy to make an appointment to talk with you when you’re available outside of our regular office hours.

Credit card payments can be made securely online. Ask us for details if you cannot find them in the ‘How to make payment’ section in our Booking emails.

 

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