Privacy policy

We understand that booking online involves significant trust on your part. We value your trust, and make it a high priority to ensure the security and confidentiality of the personal information you provide to us. Please read this policy to learn about our privacy practices. By visiting this website, you are accepting the practices described herein.

What information we collect from you

In General. We receive and store any information you enter on our website or give us in any other way. This includes information that can identify you ("personal information"), including your first and last name, telephone number, postal and email addresses, fax number, and billing information (such as credit card number, cardholder name, and expiration date). We may also request information about your hotel room preferences, and frequent flyer and car rental program information. You can choose not to provide information to us, but in general some information about you is required in order for you to book travel; participate in a survey, contest, or sweepstakes; ask us a question; or initiate other transactions on our site.

Travel Companion Information. When you make a reservation for someone else through this website, we may request personal information and travel preferences about that individual. You should obtain the consent of other individuals prior to providing us with their personal information and travel preferences, as any access to view or change their information will be available only through your account.

Information from Other Sources. We also may periodically obtain both personal and non-personal information about you from affiliated entities, business partners and other independent third-party sources and add it to our account information. Examples of information we may receive include: updated delivery and address information, purchase history, and demographic information.

Automatic Information. We automatically collect some information about your computer when you visit this website. For example, we will collect your IP address, Web browser software (such as Firefox, Safari, or Internet Explorer), and referring website. We also may collect information about your online activity, such as trips viewed and bookings made. Our goals in collecting this automatic information include helping customize your user experience and inhibiting fraud.

How we use your information

We use sensitive billing information (such as cardholder name, credit card number, and expiration date) for the purpose of completing the travel bookings you conduct on our site. We use other information about you for the following general purposes: to provide you with the products and services you request; to provide you with travel confirmation and updates; to manage your booking, including processing bills and providing travel notifications; to communicate with you in general; to respond to your questions and comments; to measure interest in and improve our products, services, and website; to notify you about special offers and products or services that may be of interest to you; to otherwise customize your experience with this website; to reward you as part of any reward and recognition program you choose to join; to solicit information from you, including through surveys; to resolve disputes, collect fees, or troubleshoot problems; to prevent potentially prohibited or illegal activities.

Email Communications. We want to make it easy for you to take advantage of travel-related opportunities on this website. One way we do this is by sending you email messages that contain information about your apparent travel-related interests. We believe these email messages will provide you with useful information about travel-related special offers available through our site. Please note that you will have the opportunity to choose not to receive these special offer email messages in any such email we send.

With whom we share your information

This website may share your information with the following entities:

• Suppliers, such as hotel, airline, car rental, insurance companies and activity providers, who fulfill your travel reservations. Throughout this site, all services provided by a third-party supplier are described as such. We do not share your email address with these suppliers unless they need it to fulfill the travel reservation you have made through this site, and we restrict their use of this information to that purpose. We do not place limitations on our suppliers' use or disclosure of your other personal information. Therefore, we encourage you to review the privacy policies of any travel supplier whose products you book through this site. Please note that these suppliers also may contact you as necessary to obtain additional information about you, facilitate your travel reservation, or respond to a review you may submit.

• Third-party vendors who provide services or functions on our behalf, including credit card processing, business analytics, customer service, marketing, distribution of surveys or sweepstakes programs, and fraud prevention. We may also authorize third-party vendors to collect information on our behalf, including as necessary to operate features of our website or to facilitate the delivery of online advertising tailored to your interests. Third-party vendors have access to and may collect information only as needed to perform their functions and are not permitted to share or use the information for any other purpose. They are also required to follow the same data security practices that we ourselves adhere to.

• Business partners with whom we may jointly offer products or services, or whose products or services may be offered on our website. You can tell when a third party is involved in a product or service you have requested because their name will appear, either alone or with ours. If you choose to access these optional services, we may share information about you, including your personal information, with those partners. Please note that we do not control the privacy practices of these third-party business partners.

Your choices with respect to collection and use of your information

• As discussed above, you can choose not to provide us with any information, although it may be needed to book travel or to take advantage of certain features offered on this site.

• You may be given the opportunity to subscribe to an email newsletter to receive information about special offers. If you choose to do so, you will also be given the opportunity to unsubscribe from commercial messages in any such email we send. Please note that we reserve the right to send you other communications, including service announcements, administrative messages, and surveys relating to your transactions on this site, without offering you the opportunity to opt out of receiving them.

• You may have the opportunity on our website to provide a mobile number in order to receive day-of-travel flight alerts. You may discontinue these alerts at any time.

• The Help portion of the toolbar on most browsers will tell you how to prevent your browser from accepting new cookies, how to have the browser notify you when you receive a new cookie, or how to disable cookies altogether. Please note that if you refuse to accept cookies from this site, you will not be able to access portions of our site. Cookies and other technologies

Cookies are small data text files and can be stored on your computer's hard drive (if your Web browser permits). This website uses cookies for the following general purposes:

• To help us recognize your browser as a previous visitor and save and remember any preferences that may have been set while your browser was visiting our site. For example, if you register on our site, we may use cookies to remember your registration information, so you do not need to log into our site each time you visit. We also may record your password in a cookie, if you checked the box entitled "Sign me in automatically next time." Please note that member IDs, passwords, and any other account-related data included in such cookies are encrypted for security purposes. Unless you register with us, these cookies will not contain any personal information.

• To help measure and research the effectiveness of website features and offerings, advertisements, and email communications (by determining which emails you open and act upon). The Help portion of the toolbar on most browsers will tell you how to prevent your browser from accepting new cookies, how to have the browser notify you when you receive a new cookie, or how to disable cookies altogether. Please note that if you refuse to accept cookies, you may not be able to access many of the travel tools offered on our sites.

This site may also use Web beacons (also known as clear gifs, pixel tags or Web bugs), which are tiny graphics with a unique identifier, similar in function to cookies, that are placed in the code of a Web page. We use Web beacons to monitor the traffic patterns of users from one page within our sites to another, to deliver or communicate with cookies, to understand whether you have come to our site from an online advertisement displayed on a third-party website, and to improve site performance. We also may allow our service providers to use Web beacons to help us understand which emails have been opened by recipients and to track the visitor traffic and actions on our site. This helps us measure the effectiveness of our content and other offerings.

Data collected by business partners and ad networks to serve you with relevant advertising. The advertisements you see on this website are served by us or by our service providers. But we also allow third parties to collect information about your online activities through cookies and other technologies. These third parties include (1) business partners, who collect information when you view or interact with one of their advertisements on our sites; and (2) advertising networks, which collect information about your interests when you view or interact with one of the advertisements they place on many different websites on the Internet. The information gathered by these third parties is used to make predictions about your characteristics, interests or preferences and to display advertisements on our sites and across the Internet tailored to your apparent interests. We do not permit these third parties to collect personal information about you (such as email address) on our site, nor do we share with them any personal information about you.

Please note that we do not have access to or control over cookies or other technologies these third parties may use to collect information about your interests, and the information practices of these third parties are not covered by this Privacy Policy. Some of these companies are members of the Network Advertising Initiative, which offers a single location to opt out of ad targeting from member companies.

How we protect your information

We want you to feel confident about using this website to make travel arrangements, and we are committed to protecting the information we collect. While no website can guarantee security, we have implemented appropriate administrative, technical, and physical security procedures to help protect the personal information you provide to us. For example, only authorized employees are permitted to access personal information, and they may only do so for permitted business functions. In addition, we use encryption when transmitting your sensitive personal information between your system and ours, and we employ firewalls and intrusion detection systems to help prevent unauthorized persons from gaining access to your information. External links

If any part of this website links you to other sites, those sites do not operate under this Privacy Policy. We recommend you examine the privacy statements posted on those other websites to understand their procedures for collecting, using, and disclosing personal information.