INFORMATION COLLECTION
Information We Collect from You
We collect information from you when you choose to provide it to us. This may include when you create an account with us, sign up for our email lists, use our services, submit a rating or review, participate in a survey or promotion, or otherwise contact us.
Grand Circle may collect “Personal Information” such as name, addresses, telephone number and e-mail addresses. For example, we collect personal information through the establishment of a “My Planner” and in connection with payments made through this Website.
We may collect provide certain payment information, such as payment card or other financial account information from you, and billing address. A third-party payment processor collects and processes this information on our behalf; we do not collect or retain your payment information except as necessary to provide additional services to you.
User Generated Content
When you voluntarily disclose information about yourself in the content that you submit to this website (e.g., personal information such as your name, phone number and personal web address) through a traveler review or other public posting on the website, this information will be publicly available, can be collected and used by third parties and may result in unsolicited messages from others. Such activities are beyond our control. Please refrain from disclosing personal information on this website that you intend to keep private.
Please also note that by submitting a traveler review or other public posting on this website, it becomes the property of Grand Circle, and we may reproduce some or all of it in our promotional materials—either elsewhere on our website, our social media, in an email, or in our catalogs. You also authorize us to disclose your last name, hometown and state, and travel history with us in connection with the review.
Information Received from Third Parties
We also may receive information about you from third parties. If you provide us with personal information about others, or if others give us your information, we will only use that information for the specific reason for which it was provided to us. For example, we may supplement the information we collect with outside records, or third parties may provide information in connection with a co-marketing agreement or at your request (such as if you choose to sign in with a third-party service such as Facebook). If we combine the information we receive from others with Personal Information we collect through the Site, we will treat the combined information as Personal Information as described in this Privacy Statement.
Information Collected From Other Sources
We may obtain information about you from other sources, including social networks that you use to connect with us. If you use a third party service to login, link to us, or communicate with us (such as a social network or third party video chat), we may receive certain information about you from the third party based on your registration and privacy settings on those third party services. This information may include name, user name, demographic information, updated address or contact information, interests, and publicly-observed data, such as from social media and online activity.
Social Media
The Site also may permit additional interactions between it and a third party website, service, or other content provider, such as enabling you to “like” or share content to a third party social media service (such as Facebook), or to share content from a third party social media service to our Site. If you choose to “like” or share content, or to otherwise share information from or via our Site with a third party site or service, that information may be publicly displayed, and the third party may have access to information about you and your use of our Site (and we may have access to information about you from that third party). Please note that your relationship with any social media service is governed solely by your agreement(s) with such social media service and your interactions with third parties through social media or similar features are governed by the respective privacy policies of those third parties. You may also be able to modify your privacy settings with these third party social media websites.
You can choose to access certain third party social media websites and services through our site (such as Facebook). When you do so, you are sharing information with those sites, and the information you share will be governed by their privacy policies. You may also be able to modify your privacy settings with these third party social media websites.
Information Collected from Users Automatically and cookie policy
As is true of most web sites, Grand Circle automatically collects some information about your computer when you visit our Site, such as your IP address, browser type, referring/exit pages, and operating system. In addition to personal information, Grand Circle may also gather non-personally identifiable information, which may be used by Grand Circle. Generally, “non-personally identifiable information” means information that is collected by automatic or electronic means, using technologies such as cookies, pixel tags and web beacons, browser analysis tools, and web server logs or other technologies to automatically collect certain information when you use our Site or interact with our emails and online or mobile advertisements. As you use our website, your browser and devices communicate with servers operated by us, our business partners and service providers to coordinate and record the interactivity and fill your requests for services and information.
Our websites actively log and record information of a non-personal nature such as referral websites, visits, length of sessions, domains, browser software and more. We aggregate and use this non-personal data to improve our website experience for you. We also record the IP address of the computers that visit our website. We also may collect information about your online activity, such as content viewed and pages visited. One of our goals in collecting this automatic information is to help us understand the interests of our travelers and customize your user experience. We may also use information about your online activities for offline marketing purposes.
We capture the following information:
- Domain Name – through which you access the Internet
- IP address – from the computer or network used to access our website
- Web browser – and operating system used
- Date and time – you accessed our site
- Referral Internet address – of the website from which you clicked to get to our website
- Search terms – used in a search engine (like google.com) that brought you to our website.
We may also use third-party tools or services, such as Google Analytics, to assist us with analyzing and improving the Site or our services. These service providers are not permitted to use the information collected on our behalf except to help use conduct and improve our business.
We will also facilitate the implementation third party tags on our website and to deploy third party cookies and similar device tracking technologies; such tags will facilitate the collection of pseudonymous information relating to an individual’s interactions with our Site.
The information we collect also includes the Internet Protocol (“IP”) address or other device identifier (“Device Identifier”) for any device (computer, mobile phone, tablet, etc.) used to access the Site. A Device Identifier is a number that is automatically assigned or connected to the device you use to access the Site, and our servers identify your device by its Device Identifier. Some mobile service providers may also provide us or our third party service providers with information regarding the physical location of the device used to access the Site. If such information is linked to your Personal Information, we will treat it as Personal Information under this Privacy Statement.
Cookies and other web technologies.
Grand Circle uses an email delivery and marketing company to send emails. Pixel tags and cookies are used in those email messages and at our websites to help us maximize the effectiveness of our marketing and our websites. A “cookie” is a small amount of information that a web server sends to your browser that stores information about your account, your preferences and your use of our websites. Pixel tags and web beacons are tiny graphic images placed on website pages or in our emails that allow us to determine whether you have performed specific actions. The data on your use of our site may be linked to the personal Information you have chosen to share with us when you register.
The technology used to collect information automatically from You may include the following:
Cookies: We use cookies to store visitor preferences, record session information, record user-specific information on what pages users access or visit, alert visitors to new areas that we think might be of interest to them when they return to our site, or record past activity at a site in order to provide better service when visitors return to our site.
Most internet browsers automatically accept cookies. However, you can instruct your browser, by editing its options, to stop accepting cookies or prompt you before accepting a cookie from the sites you visit. If you decide not to accept our cookies, your ability to use some features on our site may be impaired. Certain visitors to our site may have previously received targeted promotional materials relative to the site.
Web Beacons: We may also employ software technology known as “web beacons” or “tracking tags” to help us keep track of what content on our Site is effective and to serve relevant advertising to you. Web beacons are small graphics with a unique identifier that may be invisible to you, and which are used to track the online activity of Internet users. Web beacons are embedded in the web pages you review or email messages you receive. Web beacons or similar technologies may be used for a number of purposes, including, without limitation, to count visitors to our Site, to monitor how users navigate the Site, to count how many e-mails that were sent were actually opened, or to count how many particular articles or links were actually viewed.
Embedded Scripts: An Embedded Script is programming code that is designed to collect information about your interactions with the Site, such as the links you click on. The code is temporarily downloaded onto your computer or other device and is deactivated or deleted when you disconnect from the Site.
In addition, we may use a variety of other technologies that collect similar information for security and fraud detection purposes and we may use third parties to perform these services on our behalf.