Privacy policy: what a reservation request collects, and what it never asks

Most privacy pages are long because the business behind them collects a great deal. This one can be short and specific for the opposite reason. There is no checkout here, no account to open and no card to enter. Five things get typed into the form, a sixth is hidden from you, and that is the end of the list.

Six fields, five of which you can see

The request form has six fields. Five of them you fill in yourself, and the sixth you never see.

The free text box comes first. You write in it whatever you want us to know: how many of you there are, that one person cannot walk far, that the dates are less flexible than they looked when you started. That box is what we read before anything else.

Alongside it, the form records which week or which shortlist you came in from, so we know where you were standing when you decided to write.

Then it asks roughly when you want to go. A month will do. A season will do.

After that, your name.

Last, your email address.

The sixth field is hidden, and a person never fills it in, because a person never sees it. It sits in the page to catch automated submissions, which arrive in some quantity and complete every field they can find. Anything that comes back with that field filled is thrown away unread. Nothing in it is stored, and there is nothing in it to store.

The things this form has no reason to ask for

That is the whole of it, and the omissions are the point of this page.

A telephone number is not required. Put one in the free text box if you would rather be called back, by all means, but the form does not ask for it and no request is refused for want of it.

Where you live is not asked either. There is no postal address field.

Card details are not collected in any form: no number, no expiry, no billing address. This site has no checkout and could not take a payment if you insisted on making one. Money changes hands later, with the supplier.

Passport and identity document details stay with you. The office does not touch passports, and a form with no business in them has no reason to ask.

Date of birth is not requested. Neither is financial information of any kind: no bank details, no income, nothing about credit. Health information is not asked for either. Should something about your health matter to a reservation, you decide what to say and when you say it, and it goes to the one supplier who needs to know.

A request that asks for less can still be answered

The form is short for a practical reason rather than a modest one. A request that asks for less can still be answered. We need to know what you want, roughly when, and where to send the reply. Everything else can wait for the reply itself, and a good deal of it never comes up at all.

Your email address is used to answer that one request. It is not added to a mailing list, because there is no mailing list here. No marketing email goes out from this office. We do not telephone people who have not asked to be telephoned. Your details are not sold, not rented, not swapped, not shared and not passed on, with a single exception: the supplier we have to contact in order to answer you.

That exception is narrow, and it is worth spelling out. If you have written about a week built around a small mountain guesthouse, the operator who runs that week is told what they need in order to quote: the dates, how many of you there are, and anything you have said that changes the price or the room. They are not sent the rest of your message, and they are not sent your email address unless you have asked us to put the two of you in touch.

Counting pages is not the same as counting people

The site may keep ordinary measurement of which pages get read and which do not. What that produces is a count of pages: how often the flat list of all thirty two weeks is opened, whether readers who reach a shortlist go on to open one of the four weeks in it, which of the three questions people stop at. It is a record of how the site is used, not an attempt to work out who is using it.

Nothing typed into the request form feeds any of that. No advertising profile is built from your message, your name, your email address or the dates you gave. The form and the measurement do not meet.

Whatever this site stores in your browser is functional. It is there so the pages behave: so that going back a step in the three questions does not lose your place, and so a shortlist you have already reached is still there when you return to it. You do not need an account, because there are no accounts. Nothing is kept that would identify you on anybody else's site.

How long a request sits here, and how to have it removed

Requests are answered within one working day. After that a request stays in the file while the conversation is live, and then for twelve months, because people write back the following spring saying they asked about something last year and would like to look at it again. At the end of those twelve months the request and the reply are deleted.

If a reservation was actually made, the record of it is kept longer. The office has to be able to say what it arranged and what the supplier paid it for arranging.

You can ask for a copy of everything held under your name, and you can ask for all of it to be deleted. Write to the office at 6317 N Antioch Rd, Suite 108, Gladstone, MO 64119, or telephone +1 (816) 414-3106, and say which of the two you want. If we cannot tell which request is yours, we will ask you one question to be sure, and one is the most we will ask. Requests are held by Etre Super Travel Reservations LLC, which runs this office.

This site is written for adults planning holidays and is not directed at children. The office does not knowingly collect anything from them. If it turns out that we have, it is deleted rather than kept.