A departure is a dated instance of a trip that travelers book onto. You can offer fixed dates, take requests for custom dates, or both.

Each mode has its own minimum party size and booking cutoff (how close to the start date booking stays open — by default 1 day for fixed dates, 3 days for on-request).

You can add departures one at a time, or generate a batch from a repeating schedule — pick a frequency (daily, weekly, or monthly), the times of day, a date range, and a capacity, and Samba creates them all. Running the same schedule again only fills in the missing dates, so you won't get duplicates.

If you manually change the date or time of a departure that came from a schedule, it stops following that schedule from then on — so re-running the schedule won't touch it, and it won't refill the slot it moved out of.

Each departure has a capacity. As confirmed bookings fill the seats, remaining seats go down; when they reach zero the departure shows as Sold out. If a booking is later cancelled, the seat frees up and the departure opens again automatically.

You can't set a capacity below the number of people already booked.

While a traveler is on the payment step of checkout, their seats are held for 15 minutes so nobody else can take them. If they don't finish in time, the hold is released and they're asked to confirm availability again before continuing.

Cancelling a departure cancels all of its confirmed bookings and frees the dates. It doesn't automatically refund anyone — if a refund is due, issue it per booking from that booking's cancellation options.

If any of the affected bookings came from GetYourGuide, cancelling here doesn't reach GetYourGuide — cancel those separately in your GYG Supplier Portal so the traveler is refunded.

Need to move someone to a different date? Use Change departure on the booking to move it to another date of the same trip that has room.