Reserve a vacation package from Kansas City by answering three questions

Etre Super Travel is a reservations office, not a magazine, a review or a guide: it publishes nothing, flies nothing and owns no beds. It arranges holidays with suppliers and is paid by them afterwards. The catalog has no front page of thumbnails. It starts with one question, and your answer decides the next one.

• Moving, but only two or three beds4 weeks, from $2,190 per person
• Moving, and a new bed most nights4 weeks, from $2,560 per person
• Staying, with a town you can walk to4 weeks, from $2,140 per person
• Staying, with nothing within walking distance4 weeks, from $2,180 per person
• A fixed date inside the busy weeks4 weeks, from $2,980 per person
• A fixed date in the quiet weeks4 weeks, from $1,890 per person
• Built around somebody who walks all day4 weeks, from $2,720 per person
• Built around somebody who cannot4 weeks, from $2,080 per person

The catalog does not open as a list

Most travel sites hand you thirty-two things at once and leave you to sort them out. This one asks a question first. If you want to reserve a vacation package from Kansas City, the site begins by asking who else has to agree to the dates: nobody else, or somebody else's calendar. Whichever you pick, a second question follows from it, and then a third. By the end you are standing in front of four weeks instead of thirty-two, and those four are there because of what you said, not because we pushed them forward.

None of the three questions is about money. The first asks who has a say in the dates. Your answer to that decides the second, which is either whether you want to be moving or to be somewhere, or whether the fixed thing is a date or a person. Third comes the practical one, and it differs depending on where the first two have put you: how many beds you are willing to learn, whether there should be a town within walking distance, whether that date lands in the local high season, whether everybody can manage a long day on foot.

Start with a question if that sounds like a reasonable way to spend two minutes. If it sounds like an interrogation instead, the whole catalog is also written out flat, and Every week we sell is the plain version: thirty-two weeks in one list, thirteen countries, $1,890 to $3,760 per person, nobody asking you anything at all. Both doors lead to the same thirty-two weeks.

At the end of each of the eight shortlists there is a request form with six fields. It can be filled in at any hour, and the written reply goes back within one working day.

A number that sometimes argues against us

Every week in the catalog carries a number from one to four, and it answers one question only: how much of this week could you have arranged without us. One means all of it. A two is most of it, with a detail or two left over. At three, the hard half needs somebody to pick up a telephone and know who to ask for. Four is a week that does not exist without an introduction, because what stands between you and it is a person rather than a form.

That number is printed on every week's own page, including the ones marked one, where it says in plain sight that the office is not needed. We print it there on purpose. Plenty of readers see a one, go away and arrange the whole thing themselves, and the number has then done exactly what it is for. Others see a one and ask us to handle it anyway, which is their business and not ours to argue with, and the supplier pays the commission in either case. The mark itself is drawn rather than written: a rule of fixed length, cut into one, two, three or four pieces. The rule never gets longer or shorter. Only the breaks change.

Nothing is charged here, and three things are refused outright

There is no checkout on this site. No card field, no basket, nowhere to type a number: if you wanted to hand money over on this page you could not do it. A supplier pays the office a commission after a reservation is confirmed, and that is the whole of how the lights stay on. The arrangement has an obvious slant to it, which is one more reason the number from one to four gets printed even on the weeks where it embarrasses us.

Prices are quoted as a starting figure for one person. The real figure is settled when the reservation is made, because the same room in the second week of May is not the same room in July, and because three people sharing is not the arithmetic of two.

Three things are refused here permanently, and not because of some temporary gap in the staffing. We do not sell insurance of any kind. Visas are not our field and we will not advise on them. Passports we do not touch at all, and we will not read your documents or tell you what to file. When a week has requirements attached to it, we will say that they exist, and then you take that question to somebody qualified to answer it.

The office is a room in the Kansas City metro

The office sits at 6317 N Antioch Rd, Suite 108, Gladstone, MO 64119, and the telephone is +1 (816) 414-3106. This site is run by Etre Super Travel Reservations LLC, a Missouri limited liability company that does business under the name Etre Super Travel. It belongs to no chain and no network, and there is no larger brand standing behind it.

Nobody here flies an aircraft, owns a hotel room, drives a coach or leads a walk in the hills. We speak to the people who do that, and most of the work is knowing which of them to ask for a given week. Being small has consequences worth saying out loud: a room cannot be held on our command, a boat cannot be made to sail, and weather is weather. The part we are good at is asking the right supplier, recognising what a starting price for that week usually looks like, and telling you when a week is straightforward enough that you do not need us for it.