Booking, and cancelling

Short version: the whole stay is paid up front, and it is not refundable. We would rather you read that here, in the plainest words we have, than discover it after you have sent the money.

How booking works

1. You message us with your dates and how many of you there are.
2. We reply with what is free and exactly what it costs.
3. Payment in full confirms the room. The whole stay, up front — there is nothing left to settle when you arrive.

There is still no account to make and no app to install, and you are still talking to the people who will be there when you arrive.

The policy, plainly

What you pay is non-refundable. Because the whole stay is paid up front, that means the whole stay. If you cancel, or do not arrive, it is not returned.

We would rather put that in the plainest words we have than dress it up. It is a strict policy — stricter than most — and the two things below exist precisely because of it.

The one exception

If the road is closed — genuinely closed, by snow or a landslide or an official order, so that you cannot get here at all — we will not simply keep your money. Tell us and we will move what you have paid to another date instead.

We live on this road. We know when it is shut, usually before the news does, so this is not a conversation you will have to win. What it is not is a refund, and it is not a way out of a change of plan: a closed road means closed, not slow, not raining, not a forecast you did not like.

Why a small place does this

There are eight rooms. When one of them is held for a weekend and released at short notice, it very rarely sells again — people do not decide on the Thursday to drive three hundred kilometres on the Friday. A large hotel absorbs that across a hundred rooms. We cannot, and the alternative is charging everybody more to cover the people who do not come.

It is the same reasoning behind not adding platform commission to your room rate: a small place has fewer ways to absorb costs, so it is better to be plain about them than to hide them in the price.

Before you send anything

Two things worth doing first, both of which we would rather you did:

• Ask about the weather. If the answer is that the week looks poor, we will say so. In winter, the current position is on its own page.
• Ask whether this place suits your trip at all. We turn people towards Mussoorie fairly often, and we have written down when to book the town instead of us. It is a great deal better for everybody than a non-refundable advance on the wrong stay.

Changing plans

If something changes, tell us as early as you can. We are eight rooms and the people who own them — the earlier we know, the more we can actually do about it. Message us rather than assuming the answer.