MERAKI ITINERARIES

We’re a small, self-owned company, not a big multi-national. We sell travel services, not data. We don’t sell your personal information, ever. You trust us with your vacation; you should be able to trust us with your privacy too.

Making travel arrangements requires you entrust us with some sensitive personal information (like passport details). We take every precaution to safeguard this information and to only share it as necessary to organize your trip.

Like most websites, we do collect some data automatically as you browse our site, some of which could be personally identifiable (such as your IP address). But generally speaking, we only use this data to maintain our website or monitor traffic to it, and we purge data when we no longer need it.

For more details, read on. We’ve tried to make this Privacy Policy as clear and concise as possible. This is not intended as a legal document or contract, but a plain English explanation of how we handle and protect your data. If you have any questions or want clarification about anything, please contact us.

What information do MERAKI ITINERARIES collect?

Information that you provide to us

You may browse the majority of our website without being required to supply any personal information.

We do collect information that you provide to us when you:

  • communicate with us with a question or comment about our products or services or a booking you have made, or request a proposal for a trip
  • request a catalog
  • subscribe to our email newsletter
  • provide feedback and reviews on our products or services
  • interact with us via our social media profiles

This information may include your name, address, phone number and/or email address, the content of any messages, comments, reviews, or surveys that you submit to us, and recordings of phone calls you have made to our offices.

If you book travel with us (or request a quote for travel), we may request or require additional personal information for the purposes of arranging your trip, processing payments, supplying required information to airlines and other travel vendors, applying for foreign travel visas, complying with various laws and regulations, and ensuring your safety, wellbeing, and comfort. This may include:

  • Your date of birth and gender
  • Your mailing and/or physical address
  • Your country of citizenship and/or residency, your citizenship and/residency status, and current passport information
  • Your mother’s maiden name (where necessary to comply with some countries’ entry requirements)
  • Your meal preferences
  • Any physical disabilities or limitations that may affect your travel arrangements or ability to participate in a tour
  • Your credit card, PayPal or bank account information when making a payment

Information provided by others

Your personal information may be submitted to us by others when they:

  • Plan a private or custom tour or package and list you as a planned or prospective traveler on that trip
  • Make a booking on your behalf, or make a booking and request to share a room with you
  • Make a booking and enter you as someone to contact in case of any emergencies while traveling
  • Tell us that you referred them, or were referred by them, to us for the purposes of claiming referral credits under our Refer-a-Friend Rewards Program
  • Purchase a gift certificate for you

Information that may be automatically collected

We and our partners automatically collect certain information when you visit our website, read our emails, watch our videos, click on our online advertisements, visit our social media profiles, or otherwise engage with us. Examples of information we collect:

  • browsing data, such as webpages viewed, length of time spent on our site and on each page, links clicked, and referring websites from which you arrived at our site
  • device configuration data, such as the type of device or browser you use, your operating system, your Internet service provider, and your device’s regional & language settings
  • search terms you enter into our site-search feature
  • device identifiers, such as your IP address
  • approximate geographic location, based on your IP address and/or internet service provider

This information may be collected by our website and stored on our server or in our database, or may be collected and stored by our partners. This may be done with a variety of common technologies.

About our social media profiles?

We maintain profiles or accounts on Facebook, Instagram  and other social media sites. We encourage you to interact with us on these platforms. However, your use of these platforms, any content you post there, and any information collected by them, is governed by their own terms of use and privacy policies, which we encourage you to review.

Some pages on our site include social media features and widgets, including features to “like” or share specific travel products or pages from our site on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or other social media sites. These features may collect information such as your IP address and which page you are visiting on our site, or set a cookie to identify you or enable the feature to function properly. These features are hosted by third parties, and your interactions with them are governed by the privacy policy of the company providing it.

With your permission, we may use comments about our service and products that you have provided on our social media profiles in our advertising or on our website.

Your personal information? Do we sell or share your information?

Conducting Business

We use the information that we collect to conduct our business, including but not limited to:

  • processing your bookings and providing you with the products or services you request
  • communicating with you, especially regarding your bookings, and responding to your comments, questions, and requests
  • developing and improving our travel products
  • operating and maintaining our website
  • measuring website traffic and usage trends
  • understanding how people use our website
  • understanding the interests and demographics of our users as a whole
  • improving our website, booking process, site content, accessibility, and customer experience
  • conducting market research and measuring the performance of various marketing campaigns and channels
  • maintaining our relationship with our customers and improving their experience and satisfaction
  • addressing breaches of policies or terms, threats, or harm
  • complying with laws and responding to mandated legal notices

If you have completed a booking or payment, requested a proposal, requested a printed catalog, or communicated with us via phone or email about a booking or other questions or requests, we may keep this information indefinitely. If you have started a booking on our website but failed to complete it, we purge this information after 90 days.

Deleting obsolete data

Where practical and possible, we try to delete personal information after it is no longer needed or unlikely to be useful, including (but not limited to):

  • Purging your passport details after you return from travel
  • Purging all information associated with unfinished bookings after 30 days
  • Purging IP addresses collected with bookings, requests for proposals, and for other purposes from our database after 60 days
  • Purging web server logs after 60 days

Data Breaches

Should we become aware of any breaches of security (either on our server or with one of the third parties we employ) that may have exposed your personal information, we shall notify you as soon as reasonably possible about the breach and let you know what information might have been exposed. If you are concerned that your privacy may have been breached, please contact us.