An independent travel journal — go when the country is at its best.
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ON THIS PAGE
02 Why it is held, and on what basis
03 Retention and who else is involved
This policy is written to be read, not filed. It describes only what this site actually does.
What is held, and for how long
What this site
knows about you,
and why.
Trips and Tours is a reading site. There is no account to open, no basket, no departure to hold and no payment to take, so the amount of personal information moving through these pages is small by design — and most of it exists only because a reader chose to write to us.
Two things happen here. You read, which leaves the ordinary technical traces any web server records, and occasionally you send a message through the enquiry form, which leaves exactly what you typed into it. That is the whole surface. Everything below explains what sits in each of those two categories, how long it stays, who else is unavoidably involved in serving a website, and how to ask us to show you what we hold or delete it.
01 · INFORMATION
Two kinds of information pass through this site.
The first is voluntary. Nothing reaches us until you decide to write: the enquiry form on the Contact and Enquiries page is the only place on this site where you are asked to type anything at all, and the panel beside this sets out exactly which fields it carries and which it will never ask for. A message that fills in only what is required is read and answered like any other.
The second is automatic. Serving a page produces the usual server-side record: the address the request came from, the page asked for, the time, and the browser and device identifiers your software sends with every request. The photographs on these pages are served from external image libraries — images.unsplash.com and images.pexels.com — so those hosts receive the same request details in order to send the file. This is how any website on the internet works, and it is what allows the site to be kept online, stable and reasonably secure.
There is no third category. Nothing about you is gathered from anywhere other than those two, and neither one is combined with the other to build a picture of a reader.
REQUIRED, OPTIONAL, NEVER ASKED FOR
Required: your name, an email address and the message itself. The name lets a reply address you, the address is where the answer goes, and the message is the question being asked.
Optional context. Phone, location, subject, budget and timeframe. These say which region you are asking from, which window you are working inside and how far the money has to stretch; any of them can be left blank, and a blank field is never chased or filled in from another source.
Never asked for. Payment details, identity documents, health or financial information, and file attachments — the form does not take them, and no bought-in data is used to complete what you left out.
Whatever you leave empty simply does not exist in our records. Please keep a message to what is needed to answer it — the less you send, the less there is to hold or delete.
02 · PURPOSE AND BASIS
Three reasons, and nothing beyond them.
Each piece of information here is tied to a single purpose. Where a purpose ends, the reason for holding the information ends with it. Nothing collected for one of these reasons is quietly reused for another.
01
To answer what you asked
When you send an enquiry you are asking us to reply, and the lawful basis for handling what you typed is that request itself — the steps you have asked us to take by writing. The message is read by the people who write the guides, used to compose an answer or to correct a page, and then it stops being useful.
02
To keep the site standing
Server records and spam filtering exist so that pages load, abuse can be identified and the form is not overwhelmed by automated submissions. The basis here is our legitimate interest in running a website that works and is not trivially attacked — an interest weighed against the fact that these records are technical, short-lived and never used to build a profile of a reader.
03
To understand which guides get read
Where any analytics or measurement is used, it is used at the level of pages rather than people: which entries readers open, which ones they leave quickly, which regions and seasons draw questions. Any measurement that is not strictly necessary to serve the site runs only where you have agreed to it, and declining changes nothing about what you can read. How that reading informs the writing is described on How We Research and Write.
03 · RETENTION AND PROVIDERS
How long it stays,
and whose hands
it passes through.
Five clauses, in the order the question usually arrives. Nothing is held here because it might be useful one day: each item has an end, and that end is the reason it goes.
Enquiries, while the exchange is live
Messages sent through the form are stored privately inside this WordPress installation and in the mailbox that receives the notification. They stay while the exchange is live and for a reasonable period after it, so a follow-up question still makes sense in context and a correction can be traced back to the reader who flagged it. After that they are removed. Where a message changed a guide, what survives is an edited sentence carrying nothing personal about the person who prompted it.
Technical records, cleared in maintenance
The server-side record of a page request — the address it came from, the page asked for, the time, and the browser and device identifiers your software sends — is short-lived by nature and is cleared in the ordinary course of maintenance. It exists to keep pages loading and to identify abuse, and is never assembled into a profile of a reader.
Deletion, without waiting for a schedule
None of the periods above binds you. Ask for a message to be deleted and it is deleted — from the site’s records and from the mailbox that carried it — unless we are obliged to hold it briefly to deal with misuse of the form.
The suppliers a website cannot avoid
Infrastructure means suppliers: a hosting provider whose servers hold the site and its database, an email service that carries the notification and the reply, the security and spam-filtering layers sitting in front of the form, and the external image libraries these photographs are served from — images.unsplash.com and images.pexels.com, which between them deliver the pictures across this site.
Those image hosts are worth naming because they are passive but unavoidable. To send a file a host must receive the request for it, and that request carries your IP address and browser identifiers exactly as it does to this site’s own server. Neither of them receives anything you type into the form. Every provider here acts on our instructions, for the purpose of the service it supplies, and none may use enquiry contents for its own ends.
What never happens to a message
Your details are not sold, rented or passed to advertising networks. No marketing list is built from the form, and nothing you send triggers an automated external campaign. If a legal obligation ever compelled disclosure, we would comply with it and no further.
A landscape stands in for the subject here; nothing in it identifies a reader or a trip. It also shows the clause above at work — the file arrives from one of the external image libraries named there, which sees your IP address and browser details in order to send it, and never anything you typed into the form.
04 · YOUR RIGHTS
What you can ask us to do with it.
Because so little is held, most privacy requests here are simple to satisfy. Six of them are worth naming separately.
See what we hold
Ask for a copy of the enquiries associated with your email address and we will send back what is on file.
Correct it
If a name or an address is wrong, tell us the right one and it is amended.
Delete it
Ask for your messages to be erased and they are removed from the site’s records and from the mailbox that carried them.
Object or withdraw
If you agreed to non-essential measurement, you can withdraw that agreement at any time, and you can object to processing based on our legitimate interests.
Take it with you
Ask for your enquiry contents in a plain, portable format and we will provide them.
Complain
If you think information has been mishandled, raise it with us first — and you retain the right to take the matter to the data protection authority in your jurisdiction.
To act on a request we may need to confirm that the email address on the enquiry is yours. That check exists to stop one reader deleting another reader’s messages, and no additional identification is asked for.
05 · COOKIES AND MEASUREMENT
Small files, narrow purposes.
Some cookies are structural. They keep a form submission intact between one page and the next, remember a preference you have set, and help the security layer tell a person from a script. Without them the site would not function properly, so they are set as a matter of course.
Anything beyond that — audience measurement, aggregate reporting on which guides are read — is optional. Where such tools are in use, they run only with your agreement, that agreement can be withdrawn, and refusing it does not restrict a single page, guide or region on this site.
Your browser gives you the final say regardless. Cookies can be blocked or cleared from its settings; blocking the structural ones may make the enquiry form behave awkwardly, but nothing else will break. This site does not run advertising, so no advertising or cross-site tracking cookies are set on our behalf, and no reader is followed from here onto other websites.
06 · MAKING A REQUEST
One form for questions about your
information, too.
Privacy requests travel the same route as everything else: the enquiry form. The optional subject field is the quickest way to flag one — write Privacy request there — then say in the message which of the actions above you want: access, correction, deletion, objection or a copy of your messages. Send it from the email address you originally used, so the request can be matched to what is on file. Please do not add personal detail to support a request; it only creates more to delete.
This policy describes the site as it currently operates. If the way information is handled changes, the text here is updated to match, and material changes are described in plain language rather than buried. The conditions covering use of the guides themselves sit on Terms of Use, and the editorial position behind the whole publication is set out on About Trips and Tours.
Reading these pages asks nothing of you. The form is the only place on this site where you are invited to type anything at all — which is why a privacy question and a reader question arrive by the same door.