When the date is not yours, reserve a European vacation week in high season

Somebody else owns the date, the somebody is a calendar rather than a person, and the calendar falls in the local high season. Four weeks answer that, and on two of them the hard half is a telephone call you could make yourself if you have the language and the patience. Here is what the four have in common, where they part company, and what it takes to reserve a European vacation week in high season.

• The week of a Tuscan horse raceItaly, 7 nightsfrom $3,480 per personit does not exist without an introduction
• A festival week in upper FranconiaGermany, 8 nightsfrom $3,760 per personit does not exist without an introduction
• Harvest weeks above the DouroPortugal, 9 nightsfrom $2,980 per personthe hard half needs a telephone call
• The Alps in the fortnight everybody goesAustria, 10 nightsfrom $3,220 per personthe hard half needs a telephone call

One unbroken stroke means you could do all of it yourself. Four pieces mean it does not exist without an introduction. The written words beside the mark say the same thing, so the mark never carries the meaning alone.

What a fixed date takes off the table

All four weeks are dated by something that will not move for you. A horse race run on the same two summer afternoons year after year. A festival that prints next year's calendar before this year's has finished. A harvest that starts when the sugar in the fruit says so. A fortnight in the Alps fixed by school terms in four countries at once. You are not choosing when to go; you are choosing whether to be there when it happens.

That single fact removes most of the levers. Elsewhere in the catalog, when a room is gone we move the week. Here the week is nailed down, so the only things left to move are the bed, the distance from the bed to the thing itself, and how many nights you are willing to keep it. Rooms within walking distance of it are usually committed nine to fourteen months out, and the ones released late come on terms that suit the owner: seven nights minimum, arrival on a set day, the money due long before you travel.

Prices follow from that: from $2,980 per person for nine nights above the Douro, up to $3,760 per person for eight nights in upper Franconia. None of those figures includes getting yourself to Europe. We do not arrange the flying part and never have.

Where the four stop resembling each other

The four look alike on paper and behave differently the moment you try to hold anything.

Two of them are published to the day. The Tuscan race runs on the same two summer afternoons, and the Franconian festival posts its schedule the previous autumn, so a room can be asked for against an exact night. The Douro harvest cannot be asked for that way: picking starts when the fruit decides, usually inside a fortnight, and the confirmed dates arrive about three weeks ahead. That week is sold as a nine night window rather than a nine night date, with the room held across the swing. The alpine fortnight is fixed by nobody in particular. Nothing can be called off, because there is no event; what fixes it is that several school calendars land on the same two weeks.

Three of the four therefore carry the risk that the fixed thing does not happen. Ground can be declared unfit, a performance can be dropped. The Alps can only be rained on. Beds are nearly level across the set: two, two, two, three. Nights are not: seven, eight, nine, ten. If you are counting days away from work, that is where the difference bites.

What goes wrong here, and the order we deal with it

The failure here is nearly always the same, and it happens before anyone writes to us. People reserve their own flights first, because that is the part that feels like the decision, and then find the beds inside the ring went months ago. What is left is either forty minutes out with a car and a parking problem, or a room over a street that stays awake until two in the morning. The flights have become the fixed point instead of the week.

So we ask for the date before we ask for the country, and we ask what you have already paid for. If the flights are reserved and the date is eleven weeks away, we will describe what is actually available rather than what we would like to be. Sometimes the answer is nothing, and we say that too.

After the date we put the week to two or three suppliers with the fixed night at the head of the message, because that is the line that decides whether they answer at all. We come back with what is held, what is not held, and the terms attached to each, in writing, before you commit to anything. No money is taken here. You settle with whoever holds the room, on their paper, and a percentage reaches us afterwards. That is the whole of our income, which is why we would rather send you away than take a week you did not need us for.