Tour waitlists

I did get on a waitlist for a few months for a tour but eventually I took my name off and went with another tour altogether because I wanted to get airfare purchased. That’s the issue for me, how long can you wait while airfare steadily rises the closer you get to the time of travel?

Here is a recent discussion that may be helpful to you.

https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/tours/waitlist-question

I put my name on the waitlist for 5 different May departures of the Ireland tour back in Jan. In late Feb, I was notified there was a place available on the May 18th tour and it was being held for me for 48 hours; I took the place.

Final payments are due 60 days out and people can change to a different tour up to that point. I had figured that if I had not heard anything prior to 60 days out, that I would be unlikely to get on the tour.

I had one other occassion (pre-pandemic) where I was notified of a place from the waitlist; I don’t recall the timeframe but I did not take that tour.

I've put myself on the waitlist twice and in each case I got offered a tour and was able to go on it. My process was to choose 3 or 4 in the timeframe I wanted to travel and hope that one of them would have a vacancy. I was lucky and the tour was fantastic as usual.

Interesting responses. Has the waitlist procedure changed? Last summer we put our names on several RS Village Italy tour dates for September. We were told that when vacancies become available everyone on the wait list would receive an email. We were also told there is no guarantee for a spot but to jump on it as soon as we received the email. We did and got the date we wanted.

Margie, I don’t know what the wait list procedure is. It is possible that I was the only person (or only solo traveler) on the list so they gave me a short time to respond before they opened it up to the public.

Last year I put myself on a waitlist in January for a specific date that friends were on, and it came through in June. I think I must have been the first name on the list as I got an email saying I had a certain amount of time to respond. This year, I took longer to decide, and put myself on three waitlists in April. I was sitting at my computer when I got an email about a spot that had opened on one tour. I started the sign up process, went to find my credit card, and when I came back someone had beat me to it! So, now I’m hoping one of the others will come through. I had a strange experience with the wait list last year, though. I had first gotten an email saying there was an opening on the tour, and when I tried to sign up I got a message saying there were no openings. So I called the RS office and was told they were puzzled by the email because there hadn’t been an opening. Fortunately, there was one two weeks later.