Privacy Policy

Your privacy is critically important to us. At Travaa we have a few fundamental principles:

• We are thoughtful about the personal information we ask you to provide and the personal information that we collect about you through the operation of our services.
  
• We store personal information for only as long as we have a reason to keep it.
  
• We aim to make it as simple as possible for you to control what information on your website is shared publicly (or kept private), indexed by search engines, and permanently deleted.
  
• We aim for full transparency on how we gather, use, and share your personal information.
  

Below is our Privacy Policy, which incorporates and clarifies these principles.

If you have questions about deleting or correcting your personal data, please contact our support team using this contact form.

Who We Are and What This Policy Covers

We are the folks behind a variety of products and services designed to allow anyone – first time travelers, students, enthusiasts, bloggers, photographers, travel guides, travel operators, tour planners, small businesses, enterprises, etc. – to plan, use and share travel itineraries with the world. Our mission is to help enable anyone travel anywhere the world in confidence and have the best times of their lives.

This Privacy Policy applies to information that we collect about you when you use:

• Our websites (including Travaa.com);
  
• Our mobile applications (including the Travaa mobile app for Android and iOS); and
  
• Our other products and services that are available on or through our websites (including Travaa.com itineraries).
  

Throughout this Privacy Policy we’ll refer to our website, mobile applications and other products and services collectively as “Services”.

Below we explain how we collect, use, and share information about you, along with the choices that you have with respect to that information.

Information We Collect

We only collect information about you if we have a reason to do so – for example, to provide our Services, to communicate with you, or to make our Services better.

We collect information in three ways: if and when you provide information to us, automatically through operating our Services, and from outside sources. Let’s go over the information that we collect.

Information You Provide to Us

It’s probably no surprise that we collect information that you provide to us. The amount and type of information depends on the context and how we use the information. Here are some examples:

Basic Account Information: We ask for basic information from you in order to set up your account. For example, we require individuals who sign up for a Travaa.com account to provide a username and email address – and that’s it. For users choosing to sign up/in via their Facebook or Google account, we also store your full name and Facebook/Google identification number – this is required for authenticating that it is really you in future sign in's.

Public Profile Information: If you have an account with us, we allow you to update additional information that you provide for your public profile. For example, if you have a Travaa.com account, your username and/or display name is part of that public profile, along with any other information you put into your public profile, such as a photo or an “About Me” description. Your public profile information is just that – public – so please keep that in mind when deciding what information you would like to include.

Transaction and Billing Information: If you buy something from us – a subscription plan or an itinerary, for example – you will provide additional personal and payment information that is required to process the transaction and your payment, such as your name, credit card information, and contact information.

Marketplace Site Information: If you use our marketplace service to sell itineraries (i.e. create a seller account), you will have to provide us with additional verifiable personal information and details of your bank account. This is for us to set up a Stripe account and send direct payments to you.

Content Information: If you choose to “Publish” your itinerary, your travel itinerary will be viewable and accessible by anyone on the Internet. This might be obvious to you…but it’s not to everyone!

Communications With: You may also provide us information when you send us queries, request for support assistance and in general use of our contact form.

Information We Collect Automatically

We also collect some information automatically:

• Log Information: Like most online service providers, we collect information that web browsers, mobile devices, and servers typically make available, such as the browser type, IP address, unique device identifiers, language preference, referring site, the date and time of access, operating system, and mobile network information.
  
• Usage Information: We collect information about when and what happens when you use our Services (e.g. update your itinerary, publish itineraries, etc). We use this information to get insights on how people use our Services, so we can make our Services better.
  
• Location Information: We do not collect any information about your current location or where you have been. Whilst the Travaa mobile app requires your current (GPS) location to display it in the app-map (to help you find your way around), this remains within the app on your phone. We do not collect nor store the locations you have been to.
  
• Stored Information: We do not access any information stored on your mobile device via our mobile app. However, our mobile app may require your permission to locally store images (which are shown in the app) of places and activities on your phone, in order to have them available to you even when there is no Internet or Wifi connection available.
  
• Information from Cookies: A cookie is a string of information that a website stores on a visitor’s computer, and that the visitor’s browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. If you have a Travaa account, a session cookie is used to allow you secure access to your private My Trips information (travel itineraries) and manage your Travaa.com account.
  

How And Why We Use Information

Purposes for Using Information

We use information about you as mentioned above and for the purposes listed below:

• To provide our Services – for example, to set up and maintain your account, host your itineraries, backup and restore your itineraries, or charge and pay for paid Services;
  
• To further develop and improve our Services – for example by adding new features that we think our users will enjoy or will help them to create and manage their itineraries more efficiently;
  
• To monitor and analyze trends and better understand how users interact with our Services, which helps us improve our Services and make them easier to use;
  
• To measure, gauge, and improve better understanding of user retention and attrition – for example, we may analyze which travel itineraries are more popular and so we can focus on making more resources available on those places or activities;
  
• To monitor and prevent any problems with our Services, protect the security of our Services, detect and prevent fraudulent transactions and other illegal activities, fight spam, and protect the rights and property of Travaa and others, which may result in us declining a transaction or the use of our Services;
  
• To communicate with you, for example through an email, about offers and promotions offered by Travaa and others we think will be of interest to you, solicit your feedback, or keep you up to date on Travaa and our products; and
  
• To personalize your experience using our Services and provide content recommendations (an upcoming feature).

Legal Bases for Collecting and Using Information

A note here for those in the European Union about our legal grounds for processing information about you under EU data protection laws, which is that our use of your information is based on the grounds that:

• The use is necessary in order to fulfil our commitments to you under our Terms of Service or other agreements with you or is necessary to administer your account – for example, in order to enable access to our website on your device or charge you for a paid Service; or
  
• The use is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation; or
  
• The use is necessary in order to protect your vital interests or those of another person; or
  
• We have a legitimate interest in using your information – for example, to provide and update our Services, to improve our Services so that we can offer you an even better user experience, to safeguard our Services, to communicate with you, to measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our advertising, and better understand user retention and attrition, to monitor and prevent any problems with our Services, and to personalize your experience; or
  

Sharing Information

How We Share Information

We do not sell our users’ private personal information.

We share information about you in the limited circumstances spelled out below and with appropriate safeguards on your privacy:

• Employees, and Independent Contractors: We may disclose information about you to our employees, and individuals who are our independent contractors that need to know the information in order to help us provide our Services or to process the information on our behalf. We require our employees, and independent contractors to follow this Privacy Policy for personal information that we share with them.
  
• Third Party Vendors: We may share information about you with third party vendors who need to know information about you in order to provide their services to us. This group includes vendors that help us provide our Services to you (like payment providers that process your credit and debit card information, fraud prevention services that allow us to analyze fraudulent payment transactions, email delivery and support services that help us communicate with you), those that help us understand and enhance our Services (like analytics providers). We require vendors to agree to privacy commitments in order to share information with them.
  
• Legal Requests: We may disclose information about you in response to a subpoena, court order, or other governmental request.
  
• To Protect Rights, Property, and Others: We may disclose information about you when we believe in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of Travaa, third parties, or the public at large. For example, if we have a good faith belief that there is an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury, we may disclose information related to the emergency without delay.
  
• Business Transfers: In connection with any merger, sale of company assets, or acquisition of all or a portion of our business by another company, or in the unlikely event that Travaa goes out of business or enters bankruptcy, user information would likely be one of the assets that is transferred or acquired by a third party. If any of these events were to happen, this Privacy Policy would continue to apply to your information and the party receiving your information may continue to use your information, but only consistent with this Privacy Policy.
  
• With Your Consent: In the future, we may share and disclose information with your consent or at your direction.
  
• Aggregated or De-Identified Information: We may share information that has been aggregated or reasonably de-identified, so that the information could not reasonably be used to identify you. For instance, we may publish aggregate statistics about the use of our Services and we may share a hashed version of your email address to facilitate customized ad campaigns on other platforms.
  
• Published Support Requests: And if you send us a request (for example, via a support email or one of our feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish that request in order to help us clarify or respond to your request or to help us support other users.
  

Information Shared Publicly

Information that you choose to make public is – you guessed it – disclosed publicly.

That means, of course, that information like your public profile, itineraries, other content that you make public, and your itinerary page views, votes and comments on other websites, are all available to others – and we hope you get a lot of views!

For example, the photo that you upload to your public profile, or a default image if you haven’t uploaded one, is your Avatar. Your Avatar, along with other public profile information, will display with the comments that you make on other users’ itineraries while signed in to your Travaa.com account.

Public information may also be indexed by search engines or used by third parties.

Please keep all of this in mind when deciding what you would like to publish.

How Long We Keep Information

• We generally discard information about you when we no longer need the information for the purposes for which we collect and use it.
  
• As another example, when you Remove an itinerary, it stays in our internal deleted folder just in case you change your mind and would like restore that content – because starting again from scratch is no fun, at all.
  

Security

While no online service is 100% secure, we work very hard to protect information about you against unauthorized access, use, alteration, or destruction, and take reasonable measures to do so, such as monitoring our Services for potential vulnerabilities and attacks.

To enhance the security of your account, we encourage you to use a longer, stronger password for your account, one in which is easy for you to remember but not so hard that you’ll have to write it down.

Choices

You have several choices available when it comes to information about you:

• Limit the Information that You Provide: If you have an account with us, you can choose not to provide the optional account information, profile information, and transaction and billing information.
  
• Limit Access to Information On Your Mobile Device: Your mobile device operating system should provide you with the ability to discontinue our ability to collect stored information or location information via our mobile apps. If you do so, you may not be able to use certain features (like getting current map location, for example).
  
• Opt-Out of Electronic Communications: You may opt out of receiving promotional messages from us. Just follow the instructions in those messages. If you opt out of promotional messages, we may still send you other messages, like those about your account and legal notices.
  
• Close Your Account: While we’d be very sad to see you go, if you no longer want to use our Services, you can close your Travaa.com account. Please keep in mind that we may continue to retain your information after closing your account – for example, when that information is reasonably needed to comply with (or demonstrate our compliance with) legal obligations such as law enforcement requests, or reasonably needed for our legitimate business interests.
  

Your Rights

If you are located in certain countries, including those that fall under the scope of the European General Data Protection Regulation (AKA the “GDPR”), data protection laws give you rights with respect to your personal data, subject to any exemptions provided by the law, including the rights to:

• Request access to your personal data;
  
• Request correction or deletion of your personal data;
  
• Object to our use and processing of your personal data;
  
• Request that we limit our use and processing of your personal data; and
  
• Request portability of your personal data.
  

You can usually access, correct, or delete your personal data using your account settings and tools that we offer, but if you aren’t able to do that, or you would like to contact us about one of the other rights, scroll down to How to Reach Us to, well, find out how to reach us.

EU individuals also have the right to make a complaint to a government supervisory authority.

Controllers and Responsible Companies

Travaa’s Services are worldwide. Travaa International Limited (NZBN: 9429042104643), based in Wellington, New Zealand, is the controller (or co-controller) of personal information, which means that it is the company responsible for processing that information.

How to Reach Us

If you have a question about this Privacy Policy, or you would like to contact us about any of the rights mentioned in the Your Rights section above, please use this contact form.

Privacy Policy Changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, Travaa may change its Privacy Policy from time to time. Travaa encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. If we make changes, we will notify you by revising the change log below, and, in some cases, we may provide additional notice (such as adding a statement to our homepage or the Travaa.com Blog, or sending you a notification through email or your dashboard). Your further use of the Services after a change to our Privacy Policy will be subject to the updated policy.

That’s it! Thanks for reading.

Change log

• November 1, 2016 : Initial release.
  
• May 25, 2018 : Multiple amendments to support Europe’s new General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”).
  
• July 1, 2023: Multiple amendments for updated mobile app (version 3.0) which does not collect any user data.

Attribution

Thanks and appreciation to the folks at Automattic Inc. for sharing their Privacy Policy under a Creative Commons Sharealike license.