This privacy statement sets out Travelbug's firm commitment to privacy and discloses our information gathering and usage practices. For additional information about Travelbug, please review our Travelbug Terms and Conditions.

Use of your information

Trade Me Limited (Trade Me) collects personal information about you through your use of the Travelbug Website and other Trade Me services (Services).

Trade Me may use this personal information to help it provide the Services to you, to verify your identity, to enforce or apply terms and conditions, to protect the rights, property, or safety of Trade Me Limited, its users, or others, for internal research purposes, for promoting and marketing other Trade Me products and Services to you, and for any other use that you authorise.

Trade Me does not sell or rent your personal information to third parties.

Trade Me will provide Operators with the information required to facilitate a booking that you make through the Travelbug site.

We release account and other personal information only when we believe release is appropriate for legal compliance and law enforcement (including to government agencies with statutory law enforcement responsibilities); to facilitate court proceedings; enforce or apply our terms and conditions; or protect the rights, property, or safety of Trade Me Limited, Travelbug users, or others. Government agencies with statutory roles enabling them to request data from us includes but is not restricted to Police, IRD and the Ministry Of Economic Development. Members can contact Trade Me to ask whether such information has been provided.

Trade Me uses its BookIt system in order to provide you with the Travelbug services. View the BookIt Terms and Conditions.

Email

It is the policy of Travelbug to send our users emails from time to time. It is also our policy to immediately remove any user from our mailing list upon the user's request. In addition, we may send Travelbug users a monthly newsletter or weekly deals email. Newsletters and deals emails will contain clear and obvious instructions for how the users can remove themselves from that mailing list.

Contact information

To make an online booking on Travelbug, you are required to provide us with your contact information and perhaps other demographic information. We may use your contact information from the booking form to send you information about our company and promotional material from some of our affiliated partners. Your contact information is also used to contact you when necessary. If you’re an advertiser on Travelbug and you have selected to purchase additional advertising features to be charged on a recurring basis, your contact details (such as name, email address and phone number) will be supplied to Chargify, but only for the purposes of billing by Trade Me Limited. View Chargify’s privacy policy.

Credit card security

We work diligently to protect the security of your personal information, including credit card information.

We protect your credit card information during transmission by using the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol, which encrypts your information when transmitted over the Internet. Trade Me retains only partial card details. However they may be held by Direct Payment Solutions (DPS), (review their privacy policy).

Cookies

Cookies are small pieces of information that are stored by your web browser in a file on your computer's hard drive when you use Travelbug. We use cookies to deliver information and fresh content specific to your interests and to improve the experience of using Travelbug. We also use them to deliver information and fresh content specific to your interests. Cookies are widely used on most major websites.

Travelbug uses "session" cookies, which temporarily store information so our service can remember things you have done. The stored information is used to deliver the right content to you as you use the site. Session cookies expire immediately when you close your web browser or are deleted after 30 minutes of no activity on Travelbug.

We also use “persistent” cookies to personalise the user experience, to help protect our members and to provide us with research information (such as how often members visit Travelbug each month). Persistent cookies also allow us to provide you with the ‘My Shortlist’ feature.

Trade Me also participates in Google's AdWords pay-per-click advertising programme. AdWords advertisements appear on Google's search result pages and on the Google Network. Google uses cookies to measure the number of Google users that click on an advertisement and visit certain Travelbug web pages, or who complete certain actions on the Website. Google provides this data to Travelbug without identifying the users. View Google's privacy policy.

Other information we collect

We use additional information to do internal research on our users' demographics, interests, and behaviour to better understand and serve you and the Travelbug community. This information may include the URL that you just came from (whether this URL is on our site or not), which URL you next go to (whether this URL is on our site or not), what browser you are using, and your IP address (when bookings are made or review comments are placed).

If you choose to post comments for other users, we will collect the information you provide to us.

If you send us personal correspondence, such as emails or letters, or if third parties send us correspondence about your activities or comments on the Travelbug site, we may collect such information into a file specific to you.

Advertising and third party links

Some Travelbug advertisers may request information directly from users, or link to sites that do so. We have no control over advertisers' privacy policies, and encourage you to review such policies prior to submitting any personal information to them.

Travelbug contains non-advertising links to a variety of third party sites to enhance the user experience. We have no control of either the content or privacy policies of such sites, nor should such links be considered an endorsement of these sites except where otherwise noted.

In some cases, third party advertisers may also use cookies in certain advertisements that appear on the Website for advertising purposes. For example, Trade Me participates in Google AdSense advertising, and as part of this, Google may use cookies in order to reduce the number of times you see the same ad.

Trade Me also uses Google’s DoubleClick services to deliver display advertisements intended to be relevant to your interests, based on the information you have provided to us through the use of any of the Services and the Website. We do not provide your personal information to Google.

NZ internet statistics - Google Analytics and Nielsen Online

We use Google Analytics and the Nielsen Online counting system to collect information about use of the site, such as the number of visitors per day or the number of pages requested per day. To do this, Travelbug has a small piece of code on each page which counts these statistics.

For more information, view the Google Analytics terms of service and the Nielsen Online privacy policy.

Updates to our privacy practices

From time to time, we make changes to our privacy practices or alter the functionality of our site. We always update this statement accordingly, so we encourage you to periodically review this page for the latest information on Travelbug privacy practices.

If you have any questions about our privacy practices or any other matter, please contact us.

 

Last updated 1 March 2012