Special event

Trips built around a date rather than a place — a balloon fiesta, an eclipse, a festival with a fixed week.

The date is the whole constraint. Lodging in the host city goes early and does not come back, so these are decided months ahead and are not itineraries to leave until the season.

When nothing is listed here, the event calendar for the year has not been set. The private and custom trips can be built around a date instead.

What makes these different to plan is that the date is fixed and everything else has to bend around it. Lodging near a host city is bought long before the itinerary is finalised, and the days either side of the event are usually the ones that make the trip worth the journey — the parks and the country around Albuquerque or wherever the event is, on the days the crowds are somewhere else.