Terms of Service

These Terms of Service are the agreement between you and Outrider Travel, LLC (“Outrider”, “we”, “us”), a travel company based in Auburn, Alabama, covering your use of this website and any trip you book through it.

They apply together with two other documents, which form part of this agreement: the Privacy Policy, and the Assumption of Risk, Release and Waiver of Liability. Read all three. If you do not accept them, do not book a trip.

To book a trip you must be at least 18 years old, able to enter into a binding contract, and booking for yourself or for someone who has authorized you to accept these terms on their behalf.

Booking requires an Outrider account. Keep the email address on it current: it is where booking confirmations, payment receipts and notices about failed payments are sent, and a missed notice does not suspend anything this agreement requires of you. You are responsible for what happens under your account, and for keeping your password to yourself.

Everything you tell us at booking, names as they appear on identification, dates of birth, ability level, dietary needs, medical conditions relevant to the trip, emergency contacts, must be accurate and complete. Lodging, lift tickets and rental equipment are booked against that information, and corrections after the fact are subject to whatever the supplier allows and charges.

Each departure is offered in tiers. A tier has its own price and its own list of what is included, lodging and room type, lift tickets, rental equipment, transport, private events, staffing, and on some tiers extras such as a private instructor, a chef, a spa treatment or a welcome package. The inclusions shown on a trip page at the moment you book are the ones that apply to your booking.

Anything not listed as included is not included. As a general matter that means airfare and travel to and from the departure city, meals other than those named, incidentals, resort and hotel incidentals charged to your room, gratuities, personal equipment, lessons other than those named, medical costs, and anything you buy on your own account during the trip.

Prices are in US dollars. A tier has limited capacity and is sold first come, first served; a spot is held once a booking is created and released if the booking is cancelled. We may correct an obvious pricing or description error before a booking is confirmed, and if we do, you may take the corrected price or cancel for a full refund of anything already charged.

Itineraries are plans, not promises about a specific day. Lift operations, terrain openings, activity timings, event schedules and room assignments within a booked category may change, and the trip is still the trip we agreed to sell you if the substance of what is included is delivered.

What happens when you book

When you book, you choose how to pay: the deposit now and the balance in installments, or the whole trip at once. Choosing a trip, a tier and one of those two options creates a booking in a pending state and holds a spot in that tier while you pay. A booking is not confirmed until that first payment has actually been captured by our payment processor. Until then the spot can be released.

The deposit

The deposit is 10% of the tier price, rounded to the cent, and is charged at the time of booking. Once it is captured, the booking moves to deposit paid, your spot is confirmed, and the balance is scheduled as installments (see section 5). The deposit is non-refundable, as set out in section 7.

The card you use to pay the deposit is saved with our payment processor and set as the card your future installments are charged to. You can tell us to use a different card by contacting bookings@outrider.travel.

Paying in full at booking

You may instead pay the whole price of the trip in one payment when you book. If you do, $100 comes off the tier price, and the discounted figure is the total price of your booking. The discount is only available at the moment you book. It does not apply if you choose the deposit and later pay the balance off early (see section 5), and it cannot be added to a booking after it is made.

Once that payment is captured, the booking moves straight to paid in full and no installments are scheduled. Because nothing is charged later, the card you pay with is not saved for future charges.

10% of the total price you pay is treated as the deposit, exactly as if you had paid the deposit and the balance separately, and is non-refundable in the same way. The rest of what you paid is treated as paid above the deposit, and the refund schedule in section 7 applies to it.

Authorizing the charges

Before you pay, the payment page asks you to tick a box agreeing to these terms and to the Assumption of Risk, and authorizing the charge being made that day. On the deposit plan the same box also authorizes Outrider to charge each scheduled installment to the saved card automatically, on the dates and in the amounts shown on that page, without asking you again. That authorization also covers a retry of a declined installment under section 6, and any installment as reduced by an early payment under section 5. It ends when the balance is paid or the booking is cancelled. You cannot pay without giving it.

How the balance is collected

The balance of the tier price after the deposit is split into 2 equal installments (the last absorbing any rounding remainder, so the installments sum exactly to the balance). They are due on fixed dates measured from the first day of the trip:

• 70 days before the trip starts, first installment.
• 40 days before the trip starts, second installment, which clears the balance.

The schedule is anchored to the trip, not to the day you booked. If you book fewer than 70 days before departure, one or both installment dates are already in the past, and those installments will be charged on the next daily run after your deposit is confirmed rather than being spread out. Booking close to departure therefore means paying most or all of the price straight away.

Automatic charges

Installments are charged automatically, without further action from you, to the card saved when you paid your deposit. A job runs once a day, finds installments that are due, and charges them off-session, that is, with no checkout page and nobody present. You will get an email each time an installment is charged, showing the amount and the remaining balance. You will not be asked to approve each charge, which is the whole point of the plan: you authorized them when you paid the deposit (see section 4).

When the payments that have gone through add up to the booking’s total price, the booking moves to paid in full and nothing further is charged.

Paying ahead

While a booking is deposit paid, you can pay toward the balance early from your bookings page, at any time. You can pay everything still owed, or any amount from $50 up to what you owe (if you owe less than $50, the whole of it). You cannot pay more than you owe. An early payment is charged to whichever card you enter at the time, and that card is not saved for later charges.

An early payment reduces your scheduled installments, earliest first. Once it goes through, it comes off the next installment due; an installment it covers completely is cancelled, and one it covers only in part is reduced by the amount the payment covers and is still charged on its original date. Any installment still scheduled after that keeps its date and amount, and is charged automatically to the card saved with your deposit. An early payment also covers an installment that has been declined or is waiting for bank verification. When nothing is left to pay, the booking moves to paid in full.

Paying ahead does not change the price of your booking. The $100 discount in section 4 is not available for paying the balance early, even all at once. Money paid ahead is treated as paid above the deposit under section 7.

So that the same balance is never collected twice, a scheduled installment is not charged while an early payment you have started is still open. An early payment left unfinished for more than 24 hours is cancelled, and the installment is then charged as normal, so starting one can delay an installment by up to 24 hours but never stops it.

If you pay more than you owe

In rare cases two payments can go through at nearly the same moment, for example an early payment and a scheduled installment, and together take more than the booking’s total price. If that happens, we refund the amount paid over the total automatically, in full, to the card it was charged to. You do not need to ask for it. That excess is not part of the deposit, is not subject to the refund schedule in section 7, and is not held as credit. How quickly the refund appears on your statement depends on your card issuer.

Keep a valid card on file. If the saved card expires, is replaced, is reported lost, or is cancelled by your bank, the charge will fail and section 6 applies. Telling us about a new card before an installment is due is the traveler’s responsibility.

If an installment is declined

If a scheduled charge is declined, we email you and try again. The retry rules are fixed:

• We attempt a declined installment at most 2 times in total.
• A retry happens no sooner than 3 days after the previous failed attempt.
• After the final failed attempt we stop retrying automatically. The installment is marked failed, the booking is flagged for us to deal with by hand, and it is then on you to settle it another way.

An unpaid balance does not cancel your booking on its own, nothing in the system cancels a booking for non-payment, but it does put the booking in breach, and we may cancel it under this section.

If your bank asks for verification

Some cards, and most cards issued outside the United States, require the cardholder to authenticate a payment personally, 3-D Secure, or strong customer authentication. An automatic charge cannot satisfy that, because there is nobody at the keyboard.

When it happens, the installment is put into an action required state and we email you a link to a page where you can complete the verification with your bank. This is treated differently from a decline in three ways that matter to you: it does not count as a failed attempt, it is not retried automatically (a repeat off-session attempt would fail the same way), and the payment simply waits for you. Until you complete it, that installment is unpaid, and if it stays unpaid the rest of this section applies.

This policy applies to every Outrider trip unless the trip’s own page states different terms, in which case the terms on that page govern that trip. The version of this policy in effect on the day you book is the version that governs your booking; Outrider may update it for future bookings, and doing so will not change terms you have already booked under.

1. Your deposit is non-refundable

The deposit is non-refundable under all circumstances once paid. It secures your spot and covers commitments Outrider makes on your behalf to lodging and vendors that we cannot recover once made.

The same applies if you paid in full at booking: 10% of the total price you paid is the deposit, and that part is non-refundable under all circumstances once paid (see section 4).

2. Refunds on everything paid above the deposit

If you cancel, the amount you have paid beyond the deposit is refunded on this schedule, measured from the day we receive your cancellation to the first day of the trip:

The deposit is forfeited in every row above. Not showing up, arriving late, leaving early or being removed from a trip is treated as a cancellation of fewer than 30 days and carries no refund and no credit for unused nights, lift days, meals or activities.

“Paid above the deposit” means every payment that has gone through on the booking other than the deposit itself: installments, early payments made from your bookings page, and, on a booking paid in full at booking, the rest of that payment. It is always the amount you actually paid, so a booking paid in full is refunded on its discounted price, and a discount is never paid out as money. An accidental overpayment is not part of it: it is refunded in full, separately, as described in section 5.

3. Missed installment payments

If a scheduled installment is missed and not resolved within 10 days, the booking is treated as cancelled by you, and the refund schedule above applies based on the date of that cancellation.

4. If one person cancels out of a group

Only costs that are attributable to you individually, a single lift ticket, one set of rentals, are eligible for a refund under the schedule above.

Shared group components are non-refundable: lodging, group transport, and group events and experiences. Those are booked and paid for as a whole, and the rest of your group continues to use them whether or not you travel.

5. If Outrider cancels the trip

If Outrider cancels a departure, for weather, a vendor failure, insufficient group size, or other unforeseen circumstances, you will receive, at Outrider’s discretion, either a full refund of all amounts paid (the deposit included) or a full credit toward a future Outrider trip.

6. Force majeure

Outrider is not liable for any failure to perform caused by circumstances beyond its reasonable control, including natural disasters, government travel restrictions, pandemic, and resort or venue closure. Where such circumstances prevent a trip from running, the terms in section 5 above apply.

7. Travel insurance

We strongly recommend buying third-party travel insurance when you book. Outrider does not refund outside this policy for circumstances personal to you, illness, injury, a work conflict, a missed flight, a family emergency or a change of plans. Insurance is what covers those, and most policies must be purchased close to the date of your first payment to cover pre-existing conditions or offer cancel-for-any-reason protection.

How to cancel

You can cancel yourself from your bookings page while a booking is pending or deposit paid. Doing so releases the spot and immediately stops every future installment. A booking already paid in full, whether it was paid in full at booking or reached that point through installments and early payments, cannot be cancelled online; email bookings@outrider.travel and we will handle it.

Canceling stops future charges; it does not automatically return money already taken. Refunds under this policy are calculated by hand and issued to the original card. Cancellation takes effect on the day we receive it, through the bookings page or in writing at bookings@outrider.travel.

We may cancel a departure. The usual reasons are that too few people booked it to run properly, that a supplier failed, or that conditions make it unsafe or pointless to run, the last of those is dealt with separately in section 9.

If Outrider cancels a trip for a reason that is not an event outside our control, you choose one of the following. This is a different outcome from canceling yourself, and deliberately so: you are not being asked to absorb a decision you did not make.

• a full refund of every amount you have paid us for that trip; or
• transfer of everything you have paid to another Outrider departure with capacity, with any difference in price refunded or collected.

We may also make changes short of canceling: a change of lodging within the same category, a change of dates, a change of itinerary, or a substitution of an included element for one of comparable standard. Where a change is significant, a material change of dates, of destination, of accommodation standard, or the loss of an element that was a stated headline inclusion of your tier, you may accept it, move to another departure, or cancel for a full refund of amounts paid.

In either case our responsibility is limited to the refund, credit or replacement described here. We do not reimburse airfare, other travel booked separately, time off work, or any other cost you incurred around the trip. Book refundable flights, or insure them.

Ski trips fail for weather reasons more often than for any other, and the honest position is that neither of us controls the mountain. Neither party is liable for failing to perform because of an event beyond its reasonable control. For an Outrider trip that includes, but is not limited to:

• insufficient snow, excessive snow, rain, wind, extreme cold, or a resort deciding not to open terrain or to open less of it than usual;
• avalanche, avalanche-control closures, slide paths running over access roads, and mountain rescue operations;
• closure of a mountain pass, highway, airport or rail line; flight cancellations, delays and diversions;
• lift closures, lift breakdowns, power failures, and resort closure for any reason;
• wildfire, flood, earthquake, storm and other natural events;
• epidemic or pandemic, quarantine, and government orders restricting travel, gatherings or business operations;
• war, civil unrest, terrorism, strike, labour dispute, or supplier insolvency.

A trip is not cancelled or refundable simply because conditions are poor. Thin coverage, closed terrain, rain on the lower mountain, a lift on hold, a delayed flight or a road closed for part of a day are ordinary risks of a winter trip and are yours to bear. What this section covers is an event that makes the trip impossible or unsafe to run.

Where it does, we will try in this order: to run the trip in an amended form, to reschedule it, to offer a credit against a future departure, and finally to refund.

Outrider designs, sells and staffs the trip. The individual services inside it are provided by independent third parties: hotels and lodging operators, ski resorts and lift-ticket vendors, rental and demo shops, ski instructors and guides, shuttle and private car operators, chefs and caterers, spas, venues, airlines and insurers.

Those suppliers are not our employees or our agents. They control their own operations, their own safety practices and their own staff, and their own terms and conditions apply to you when you use their services, a lift ticket, a rental agreement and a hotel registration card each carry their own contract, including their own liability waivers, which you enter into directly with them.

We are not liable for the acts, omissions, negligence, defaults or failures of any third-party supplier , including injury, illness, death, delay, loss or damage to property arising from services they provide. We select suppliers with care and we will help you pursue a complaint against one, but the claim is yours and it lies against them.

Outrider does not provide travel insurance, and no package includes it. Nothing in a trip’s inclusions should be read as cover for your trip, your health, your belongings or your ability to travel.

We strongly recommend buying third-party travel insurance at the time you book. The cancellation terms in Cancellation and refunds are the whole of what Outrider refunds. Insurance is what covers the rest: illness, injury, a work conflict, a family emergency, a missed connection, lost baggage, or medical costs on the mountain.

Buy it early. Most policies only cover a pre-existing condition, or offer cancel-for-any-reason protection, when they are purchased within a short window of your first payment.

Group codes

Every booking is issued a six-character group code, and you can enter someone else’s code when booking the same trip to be grouped with them. A group code is a rooming and planning device: it tells us who wants to travel together.

It does not create a joint booking or any shared liability. Each traveler has their own booking, pays for it on their own card, whether by deposit and installments or in full, and can cancel independently of everyone else in the group. One person canceling does not cancel anyone else, does not change what anyone else owes, and does not entitle anyone else to a refund. Being in a group does not guarantee a specific room, a specific room-mate or a specific suite: those depend on the tier booked and on availability. All of this applies except for a penthouse, as set out in Penthouses below.

Penthouses

A penthouse is sold to one group as a whole, and the group code is how the rest of the group joins it. By booking a place in a penthouse, you agree to the following, which is also shown on the booking and payment pages:

A penthouse is booked by the whole group. Once the first place is booked, your group has 7 days to fill all eight. If any places are still empty after that, the group owes the difference for them, and our team will work out the details with you.

Transfers and name changes

A booking is personal to the traveler named on it. You cannot resell it or transfer it privately.

We will try to accommodate a substitution, someone taking your place on the same trip and tier, subject to what each supplier allows. Lodging can usually be renamed; lift tickets and rental reservations often can, but not always; insurance may need to be reissued and may not be transferable at all. Any supplier charge is passed on to you. Substitutions are arranged by emailing bookings@outrider.travel; there is no way to do it yourself on the site.

These are small groups in shared accommodation in the mountains. What one person does affects everyone, and Outrider staff have final say on the ground.

You agree that you will:

• follow the instructions of Outrider staff, guides, instructors, drivers and resort personnel, and follow resort rules, posted closures, rope lines and the skier responsibility code;
• ski or ride within your ability and in control, and not enter closed or out-of-bounds terrain;
• treat other travelers, staff, suppliers and their property with respect, and not harass, threaten or endanger anyone;
• keep your alcohol and any other substance use to a level that does not endanger you or anyone else, and not ski or ride impaired;
• be on time for scheduled departures, transport will not wait indefinitely, and getting yourself to the next point is then your cost and your problem.

We may remove you from a trip, immediately and without a refund, if in our reasonable judgment your behavior endangers you or anyone else, is seriously disruptive, is unlawful, or is likely to damage property or Outrider’s relationship with a supplier. If you are removed, getting home is at your own cost, and you remain liable for damage you caused and for any charge a supplier passes to us because of you, including damage to accommodation.

You are also responsible for your own health and fitness for the trip, and for telling us before departure about any medical condition, medication, allergy or limitation that could affect your safety or ours. Section 14 and the assumption of risk document cover this in more detail.

Skiing, snowboarding and mountain travel are dangerous activities that injure and kill people every season. Those risks cannot be eliminated by anything Outrider does, and they are an inherent part of what you are buying.

By booking a trip you confirm that you have read and accept the Assumption of Risk, Release and Waiver of Liability, which forms part of this agreement and which every traveler is required to sign before departure. Read it. It asks you to accept those risks and to give up legal claims, and it is written to be understood rather than hidden.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Outrider is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages , including lost profits, lost enjoyment, lost time, and the cost of travel or accommodation you booked separately, arising out of or relating to this agreement or a trip, whether the claim is in contract, tort or otherwise, and whether or not we were told such loss was possible.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, our total liability to you for any claim arising out of or relating to this agreement or a trip is limited to the amount you actually paid Outrider for the trip giving rise to the claim.

Nothing in this agreement excludes or limits liability that cannot be excluded or limited by law, including liability for death or personal injury caused by our own negligence where the applicable law does not permit that to be excluded, or for fraud.

The Outrider name, logo, photography, copy and design are ours or our licensors’, and are protected by copyright and trade mark law. You may use this site to look at trips and manage your own bookings. You may not copy, scrape, resell or republish its content, interfere with it, attempt to access anyone else’s account or data, or use it in any way that breaks the law.

The site is provided as it is. We try to keep it accurate and available, but we do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that every price, date, image or availability figure is correct at every moment. Where an obvious error is shown, section 3 applies.

If something goes wrong, tell us first. Most things are fixable, and we would rather fix them than argue about them. Email bookings@outrider.travel with the detail and give us thirty days to resolve it before starting any formal process.

If any part of this agreement is held unenforceable, that part is limited or removed to the minimum extent necessary and the rest stays in force. Our not enforcing a term on one occasion does not waive it. This agreement, together with the Privacy Policy, the assumption of risk document, and the trip and tier details shown when you booked, is the entire agreement between us about your trip.

We may update these terms. Every version carries a version number and the dates it was updated and took effect, shown at the top of this page.

The version in force when you booked is the version that applies to that booking. A later change does not reach back into a booking already made. Where a change materially affects what you owe or what you can claim, we will tell travelers with live bookings and, where it applies to their booking, ask them to accept it.

Outrider trip texts is our text-message program for travelers. If you tick the text-message box on your trip page, we send automated texts about your trip to the mobile number you give us: logistics such as transfer and meeting times, reminders about payments and the things we need from you before you travel, and changes to plans. You can text us back, and a person replies.

• Message frequency varies.
• Message and data rates may apply.
• Reply HELP for help, or email bookings@outrider.travel.
• Reply STOP to cancel at any time. You will get one message confirming it, and no more after that unless you opt in again. Any other reasonable request to stop, by text or by email, is honored the same way.
• Consent to receive texts is not a condition of booking or of any purchase. The box is separate from your acceptance of these terms, and it is never ticked for you.
• Carriers are not liable for delayed or undelivered messages.

How we handle your mobile number and your consent is set out in the Privacy Policy. We do not share either with third parties for their marketing.

Outrider Travel, LLC, Auburn, Alabama. Questions about these terms, a booking, a cancellation or a payment: bookings@outrider.travel.

Related documents: Privacy Policy and Assumption of Risk.