Booking from abroad: how payment, protection and time zones actually work

Short answer: we’re a small UK-based team, trips are priced in pounds regardless of where you’re booking from, and our one-to-two-day reply promise holds no matter what time zone your inquiry lands in: the reply just won’t necessarily arrive in your own daytime hours.

The situation

If you’re booking from California, Toronto, or Abu Dhabi rather than the UK, the practical questions are genuinely different from a UK-based traveller’s. What time zone does someone actually reply in? How does payment work when pounds aren’t your everyday currency? And what protection do you actually have, booking a land package from a company registered somewhere you don’t live?

Time zones and response times

We work UK hours, which means an inquiry sent from the US West Coast in your evening often gets picked up overnight your time and answered by the time you wake up: not instantly, but well within the one-to-two-day window we promise everyone, regardless of where the inquiry came from. Gulf-based inquiries tend to land closer to our own working hours, so replies there are often same-day. Either way, the promise is the same: someone from the team gets back to you within one to two days, by whichever contact method you told us you preferred.

Payment, in practice

Every trip is priced and paid in pounds sterling, not in your local currency: this is true whether you’re booking from London or Los Angeles. That means a currency conversion happens on your end, through your bank or card provider, at whatever rate applies on the day you pay. It’s worth checking your bank’s foreign transaction fees before booking, since those vary and are outside anything we control. We don’t currently take deposits or payments while our formal payment process is still being finalised: see our Terms and Conditions for exactly where that stands.

What protection actually applies

This is worth being direct about rather than vague. Because every trip is land-only (no flights included), the usual UK package-travel and ATOL protections that apply to flight-inclusive holidays don’t apply here, wherever you’re booking from. We’ve written a full explanation of what that means and what we’re doing about it on our Booking Protection page, and we’d rather you read that honestly than assume a protection that isn’t in place yet.

What this means for a Rooetd traveller

Being outside the UK doesn’t change your price, your response time, or how the trip itself is built; it changes the currency conversion on your end and, sometimes, the hour a reply lands in your inbox. Tell us your time zone and preferred contact method (email or WhatsApp) when you inquire, so we can set the right expectation on when to expect a reply rather than leaving you guessing.

Before you go

• Check your card or bank’s foreign transaction fee before paying: a small percentage difference between providers adds up on a full trip price.
• If WhatsApp is easier for you to check at odd hours than email, say so: we use whichever method you actually prefer.
• Read the Booking Protection page before you commit, not after: it’s a short, honest read, and it’s better to know where things stand upfront.