Privacy Policy

Your account: email address, username, display name, and a securely hashed password. If you sign in with Google, we receive your Google account id, name, email and profile picture.

Your profile: profile photo and bio, if you add them, and your preferences (currency, language, email choices).

Bookings: for each traveller, title, first, middle and last name, gender and date of birth, plus an email address and (optionally) a phone number for adults. We also keep the flights, seats, fare, booking reference and e-ticket numbers, and the searches you run.

Payments: card payments go directly to Stripe. We keep only references to Stripe records (such as your Stripe customer id and payment ids), and show the card brand, last four digits and expiry that Stripe gives us for saved cards. Your coin balance and wallet history are stored with your account.

Community activity: posts (photos, videos, captions, locations, categories and hashtags), comments, likes, saved posts, follows, coin gifts, notifications and direct messages.

How you use the site (only if you allow analytics or advertising cookies): pages and ads you view, what you click, your browser and device, and your approximate location based on your IP address. See Cookies & Tracking.

Account activity (when you’re signed in): the days and hours you use VacationMe, the country your connection comes from (worked out from your IP address on our own servers; we don’t keep the address), the kind of device, system and browser or app you use, and your device’s language setting. It involves no cookies, isn’t used for advertising and isn’t shared.

Devices and addresses (when you’re signed in, and when you sign up): a random id the website or app keeps for your browser or phone, and the IP addresses your account is used from, to keep people banned for breaking our rules from coming back. Device ids are forgotten after 400 days unused, addresses after 30 days. If an account is banned, we keep what identifies it (its email in a scrambled form, its Google account id, its device ids, the card fingerprints Stripe gives us and its recent addresses) for as long as the ban lasts, even if the account is deleted. It isn’t used for advertising and isn’t shared.

Website visits (everyone, signed in or not): the pages you view on vacationme.com, the site or campaign that brought you, the country your connection comes from, the kind of device and browser, your language setting, and your cookie choice (whether you allowed analytics or advertising cookies), to count visitors. It uses no cookies and stores nothing on your device. We don’t keep your IP address: a visitor is counted by a code made from it that changes every day and can’t be turned back into the address, so visits can’t be linked from one day to the next. It isn’t used for advertising and isn’t shared.

Marketing emails (only if you’ve opted in): whether you opened them and which links you clicked.

Trip planner chats (only if you use it): what you write to the planner and its answers. See The trip planner.

• To create and secure your account and keep you signed in.
• To search, reserve, pay for and ticket your flights, and show them in My trips.
• To run the community: show posts, deliver messages and send you alerts.
• To process coin purchases and gifts.
• To keep VacationMe safe, fix problems, and meet legal and accounting duties.
• To keep people banned for breaking our rules from signing up again (devices and addresses). A new account that matches a banned one may be refused, or checked by our team.
• To keep accounts secure (for example, noticing use from an unusual country) and to make sure VacationMe works well in the countries and on the devices our members use (account activity).
• To understand how the site is used and improve it (analytics, with your permission).
• To show ads. Ads are personalised using your activity only if you allow advertising cookies; otherwise any ads you see are not personalised.
• To send you deals and travel ideas by email if you’ve opted in, and to learn which emails are useful from opens and clicks.

We use your data for advertising and marketing only as this policy describes, and only with your permission where the law requires it.

• Public: your display name, profile photo, bio, posts, comments, and follower and following counts. Anyone can see these, including people without an account. Your username is private: it’s used to sign in and isn’t shown to others.
• Private: your email, bookings, traveller details, payment details, wallet and direct messages (visible only to the people in the conversation).
• Coins you receive are shown only to you.

• GlobalTravel.com, the travel agency VacationMe books flights, hotels, car rentals and cruises through. When you choose one of them you go to GlobalTravel.com’s booking site; what you enter there (travellers, contact and payment details) goes to GlobalTravel.com and the airlines and hotels, under GlobalTravel.com’s own privacy policy. We don’t receive your payment details.
• Google, only if you choose to sign in with Google.
• Google (Gemini), only if you use the trip planner: the messages you write to it, with personal details we can spot taken out first. See The trip planner.
• Photon (komoot) and Open-Meteo: when you type a location for a post, the text you type is sent to them to suggest places. Open-Meteo also provides the weather on the home page.
• Ticketmaster, for Events, Shows & Games: what you search for (words, a city, dates), and if you use “Near me”, your area rounded to about 10 km. Nothing about who you are. Event pictures load from Ticketmaster’s servers, and tickets are bought on Ticketmaster’s own site, under its terms and privacy policy.
• Advertising partners, if you allow advertising cookies, to show, measure and personalise ads: [ad partners to be listed]
• Analytics providers, if you allow analytics cookies: [analytics provider(s) to be listed]
• Our email provider, to send marketing emails you’ve opted in to: [email provider to be listed]
• Authorities, where the law requires it.

Opening a post’s location takes you to a Google search for that place; Google’s own privacy policy applies there.

The trip planner in the Community section is an AI assistant. Its answers come from Google’s Gemini service, on Google’s free plan. That affects your privacy, so here is exactly what happens:

• What Google receives: the messages you write to the planner (the most recent part of the chat), its earlier answers in that chat, today’s date, and the names of places VacationMe travellers post about with how many posts and what rating they have. If you let the site use your location, roughly where you’re starting from, so it can suggest driving rather than flying: described in words as about how far and which way you are from the nearest airport city (for example “about 40 km east of Kochi, Kerala, India”), never your exact location.
• What Google never receives from us: your name, username, email, account or any other identifier, your profile, bookings or location, and other members’ posts, photos, reviews or names. The posts and ratings shown with a plan are added by VacationMe’s own servers after Gemini has answered.
• Your location: the planner uses it only if your browser allows it (your browser asks you first; you can turn it off in the planner at any time). Your browser rounds it to about 10 km before it reaches our servers, which turn it into the description above and don’t store the position. The description is kept with that chat. “Directions” on a plan opens Google Maps, which works out your route on your device under Google’s own privacy policy.
• Personal details you type: before your message is sent, we remove email addresses, phone and card-like numbers and @usernames. We can’t catch everything (for example names or addresses), so please don’t include personal details.
• How Google uses it: on its free plan, Google uses what it receives to provide, improve and develop its products, and people at Google may read, annotate and process it. Google’s Gemini API terms and privacy policy apply to it.
• Where it’s available: not in the United Kingdom, the European Union and EEA, or Switzerland. We decide this from your internet address (using a database we keep on our own servers, so nobody else sees the lookup) and from the location in your profile.
• Your chats: we keep them with your account so you can return to them. Delete any chat in the planner at any time; they’re all deleted with your account, and they’re included when you download your data.
• Each person can send up to 20 planner messages a day. Its plans can contain mistakes, so check important details.

IP address country data: IP Geolocation by DB-IP (CC BY 4.0).

We use essential storage in your browser (for example, to keep you signed in). Analytics and advertising cookies are used only if you allow them, and you can change your choice at any time with Cookie settings at the bottom of every page. See Cookies & Tracking for the details.

We keep your data while your account is open. Account activity and website visit counts are kept for 13 months. Booking and payment records may be kept after that for legal and accounting reasons. The Data Deletion Policy explains exactly what happens when you delete your account.

• View and update your profile, email, password and preferences in Settings.
• Edit or delete your posts and comments at any time.
• Remove saved cards in Settings → Payment methods.
• Delete trip planner chats in the planner (Your plans).
• Delete your account in Settings → Account.
• Change your cookie choices at any time with Cookie settings, at the bottom of every page.
• Stop marketing emails in Settings → Preferences (Deals & inspiration), or with the unsubscribe link in any marketing email.
• Opt out of personalised advertising — including where the law treats it as “selling” or “sharing” personal data — by turning off advertising in Cookie settings.
• Depending on where you live, you may also have the right to request a copy of your data, correct it, or ask us to delete or restrict it. Contact us at vacationme.com/contact to do so.

Passwords are stored hashed, never in plain text, and card numbers are handled by Stripe. No system is perfectly secure, so please use a strong password that you don’t use elsewhere.

We’ll update this policy when our practices change; the date at the top shows the latest version. Questions about your privacy? Contact us at vacationme.com/contact.