Your privacy, and the security and integrity of your personal information is very important to Rough Guides! This Privacy Policy (this “Policy”) provides you with details of how we collect and process your information and personal data through your use of our site www.roughguides.com (“Site”). This includes any information you may provide through our site when you purchase a product or service, sign up to our newsletter or use other services, for example to download information.
This privacy policy was last updated on October 6th 2021.
© Rough Guides® is a trademark owned by Apa Group with its headquarters at 7 Bell Yard, London WC2A 2JR, United Kingdom and this site is owned & operated by Apa Digital AG, Bahnhofplatz 6, 8854 Siebnen, Switzerland, registered in the Commercial Register of the Canton of Schwyz, registration number CH-020.3.033.676-6). Apa Digital AG is the data controller and responsible for your personal data (referred to as “Rough Guides,” or “we” or “us” or a similar construction).
This Privacy Policy (this “Policy”) together with the Rough Guides Terms & Conditions (as applicable) apply to your use of: our website at roughguides.com (the "Website"); and any of the services accessible through the Website (the "Services").
This policy sets out the basis on which any personal data we collect from you, or that you provide to us, will be processed and used by us.
You have the right to make a complaint at any time to the supervisory authority in your country. We would, however, appreciate the chance to deal with your concerns before you approach the supervisory authority so please contact us in the first instance at mail@roughguides.com.
So that there's no misunderstanding about how we handle your personal data, we will:
We will ask you to consent to our use of cookies in accordance with the terms of this policy when you first visit our website from EEA/UK/California regions. By using our website, providing a consent and agreeing to this policy, you consent to our use of cookies in accordance with the terms of this policy.
By viewing, using, or otherwise interacting with the Website, you agree to be bound by the rules applicable of this Policy. If you do not agree to it and/or any part of this Privacy Policy, please do not use the Website or any other service offered electronically by Rough Guides.
Please note that there are some areas of the Website which you may use without any required login credentials and without the requirement that you establish an account or otherwise reveal your identity.
If you provide the Information of any other person to us, you hereby represent and warrant that you are authorized by such person (or his or her parent or legal guardian) to provide such Information for our purposes as provided herein.
By providing us with your data, you warrant to us that you are over 13 years of age. Minors may not submit booking requests and should not provide any Information to the Website without the preceding consent of their parents or their guardian. Should a minor submit a booking request it is assumed that either his parents or guardian have not supervised him or her properly and that they become liable as set forth in the Terms and Conditions and Art 333 Swiss Civil Code.
This Privacy Policy does not cover any ideas or suggestions you may submit for the Website; any information you submit in the form of social media, blogs, responses to comments, reviews or user opinion, and any other content you submit with the apparent intention that such information be published or displayed on the Website, each of which we may use for any purposes in our sole discretion without limitation. We recommend that you do not include any personal, financial, health, or other sensitive information in any such user reviews, comments, or other social media posting or content, as that information may be published and publicly available; any anonymized data.
The limits of liability and disclaimers set forth in our Terms and Conditions also apply to our liability and responsibility under this Privacy Policy.
Subject to the disclosures made in this Privacy Policy, we will not collect any Information without your knowledge and without proper legal basis, including your consent.
In order to use many of the features on the Website, including without limitation to make a booking request, you are required to create a user profile and provide secure login credentials (including username/email and password). By creating your user profile, you are aware that we are processing your personal data and the information you provide for the purposes described in this Privacy Policy and as may otherwise be permitted by applicable law.
We may store certain Information pertaining to your travel package requests, including Information pertaining to other participants for whom you are arranging travel, in order to allow you to complete requested information without having to re-input information for future trips or services.
In addition, from time to time Rough Guides may request information via surveys or contests. Participation in these surveys or contests is completely voluntary, and you have a choice whether or not to disclose this information. In addition to any use of information described in this Privacy Policy, information collected during surveys and contests will be used for the purposes specified on the forms on which it is collected.
Except as described herein, we will not sell your Information to third parties for their promotional activities unrelated to the purposes for which your information was submitted.
1) Information you give us "Submitted Information"
This is information you give us about you by filling in forms on the Website, or by corresponding with us (for example, by e-mail or via the chat functions on the Website). It includes information you provide when you register to use our services, subscribe to any of our services, enter into any transaction on the Website, participate in discussion boards or other social media functions on the Website, enter a competition, promotion or survey and when you report a problem with the Website or the Services. If you contact us, we will keep a record of that correspondence.
Before you disclose to us the personal information of another person, you must obtain that person's consent to both the disclosure and the processing of that personal information in accordance with this policy.
The information you give us may include
All information discussed in this section may be shared, in addition to the other uses described in this Policy, with the travel provider from whom you have requested bookings or other services, as necessary or appropriate to properly confirm and assemble your tour package or other services.
2) Information we collect about you and your devices “Device information”
Each time you visit our Website we may automatically collect the following information after the consent is given:
We may also process Aggregated Data from your personal data, but this data does not reveal your identity and as such in itself is not personal data. An example of this is where we review your Usage Data to work out the percentage of website users using a specific feature of my site. If we link the Aggregated Data with your personal data so that you can be identified from it, then it is treated as personal data
Sensitive data
We do not collect any Sensitive Data about you. Sensitive data refers to data that includes details about your race or ethnicity, religious or philosophical beliefs, sex life, sexual orientation, political opinions, trade union membership, information about your health and genetic and biometric data. We do not collect any information about criminal convictions and offences.
Where we ARE required to collect personal data by law, or under the terms of the contract between us and you do not provide us with that data when requested, we may not be able to perform the contract (for example, to deliver goods or services to you). If you don’t provide us with the requested data, we may have to cancel a product or service you have requested but if we do, we will notify you at the time.
How we use your personal data
We will only use your personal data when legally permitted. The most common uses of your personal data are:
Below is a summary of the key types of data that we make use of as part of the Rough Guides Website and Services. For more information on how these types of data are used and for which purposes then please see the table below.
We use information held about you in the following ways:
1) Submitted Information
We will use this information:
2) Device Information
We will use this information:
We may associate any category of information with any other category of information and will treat the combined information as personal data in accordance with this policy for as long as it is combined.
What we use your information for
Type of Information
Our legitimate interests
Discussions with a prospective client/ supplier/ associate
a) Identity
b) Contact
Necessary for our legitimate interests for negotiating or performing a contract with you.
Managing current and former client/supplier/associate relationships including:
(a) Development of client/ supplier/ associate contract
(b) Manage payments, fees and charges
(c) Collecting and recovering money owed to us
(d) execution and delivery of services
(e) notifying you about changes to my terms or privacy policy
a) Identity
b) Contact
c) Financial
d) Transaction
e) Marketing and Communications
g) Information contained in or relating to any communication that you send to us
Necessary for our legitimate interests
- for negotiating or performing a contract with you
- to keep our records updated and recover debts owed to us
- to comply with legal obligations
Administration & protection of our business & website (including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, system maintenance, resource allocation, support, reporting and hosting of data)
i) technical information
j) information about your visit
l) usage Data
Necessary for our legitimate interests for running our business and website.
Personalization of your experience with the Website and improve our content
i) technical information
j) information about your visit
l) usage Data
Necessary for our commercial interest in providing you with a good experience in our Website and Services.
Necessary for our legitimate interests to define types of customers for my products and services, to keep my site updated and relevant, to develop my business and to inform my marketing strategy.
Providing user support and to contact you for administrative purposes relating to your account, or to provide you support in response to your queries; please note that additional Information may be collected from or in response to your query (name, phone number, mailing address or email address and billing information) and other information necessary to assist you
1) Submitted information
i) Technical information
j) Information about your visit
Necessary for our legitimate interest to aid our users with any problems and questions they have in the context of using our Website or Services.
Create aggregate and anonymous demographic or other information which we may use for any purpose once decoupled from your personal or financial information (such as to assist our advertisers in choosing ad space or tracking campaigns)
i) Technical information
j) Information about your visit
Necessary for our legitimate interests to learn how customers use our products & services, to develop them, to grow our business and to inform our marketing strategy and serve more relevant advertising.
To deliver relevant content and advertisements to you, track conversions and measure and understand the effectiveness of our advertising.
The platforms where you may see advertisements from me are as follows. In the link you can find instructions how you can amend your privacy/ad settings for that specific platform.
Facebook and Instagram (ad settings, ad preferences)
Twitter (privacy)
Youtube (privacy)
Pinterest (privacy)
Google (Google Privacy Policy)
a) Identity
b) Contact
c) Profile
d) Usage
e) Marketing and Communications
f) Technical
Necessary for our legitimate interests to learn how customers use our products & services, to develop them, to grow our business and to inform our marketing strategy.
To deliver email marketing content, free resources, provide information pertaining to Rough Guides’ services which may be of interest to you and to make recommendations about other services that may be of interest to you.
a) Identity
b) Contact
c) Profile
e) Marketing and Communications
f) Technical
Consent
Shopping
To purchase ebooks from our online shop, you will be required to register an account. For this, you will be asked to provide your name, email address, a password and password reminder, your billing and delivery address. We do not share these personal details with any third parties. We use a third-party payment service (PayPal) to facilitate payment. We do not store credit card details nor do we share financial details with any third parties. Ebook purchases are subject to our Terms and Conditions of Sale & Purchase.
Forums and User Content
If you sign up to one of our forums, we will ask you to provide a username and email address so that we can let people know who posts which comment and to enable us to deal with any inappropriate or offensive behaviour.
For the same reasons, if you provide comments on any articles or upload your own content to our sites, we may ask you to provide your email address.
We want to make it clear how we use your data for marketing purposes and how you can 'opt-out' from receiving any marketing communications from us whenever you want.
Promotional offers from us
We may use your personal data (such as your Submitted Information or transaction information) to form a view on what we think you may want or need, or what may be of interest to you. This is how we decide which products, services and offers may be relevant for you.
You will receive marketing communications from us if you have signed up to receive them and, in each case, you have not opted out of receiving marketing notifications.
Third-Party Marketing
We will obtain your explicit opt-in consent before we share your personal data with any company outside APA Digital AG for marketing or promotional purposes.
Opting Out
You can ask us or third parties to stop sending you marketing messages at any time by following the “unsubscribe link” at the bottom of any marketing message sent to you.
Except as provided herein, we will not disclose your Information to third parties. We do share your personal Information as necessary to fulfil your requests or to enable certain functions or features on the Website, as follows:
- to the extent that we are required to do so by law;
- in connection with any ongoing or prospective legal proceedings;
- in order to establish, exercise or defend our legal rights (including providing information to others for the purposes of fraud prevention and reducing credit risk);
- to any person who we reasonably believe may apply to a court or other competent authority for disclosure of that personal information where, in our reasonable opinion, such court or authority would be reasonably likely to order disclosure of that personal information.
We take reasonable technical and organisational precautions to prevent the loss, misuse or alteration of your personal information. Rough Guides employs appropriate physical, administrative and technical safeguards to protect the confidentiality and integrity of Information and to reduce the risk of loss, misuse, unauthorized access, disclosure or modification of Information. Our contracts with our service providers require them to use appropriate safeguards and to operate consistently with this Policy.
We will store all the personal information you provide on our secure (password- and firewall-protected) servers.
All electronic financial transactions entered into through our website will be protected by encryption technology.
You acknowledge that the transmission of information over the internet is inherently insecure, and that we cannot guarantee the security of data sent over the internet. You are responsible for keeping the password you use for accessing our website confidential; we will not ask you for your password (except when you log in to our website).
Our data retention policies and procedure are designed to help ensure that we comply with our legal obligations in relation to the retention and deletion of personal information.
Personal information that we process for any purpose or purposes shall not be kept for longer than is necessary for that purpose or those purposes.
Notwithstanding the other provisions of this Section on Retaining your personal data, we will retain documents (including electronic documents) containing personal data:
You have rights under data protection laws in relation to your personal data. Please see below to find out more about these rights:
You have the right to:
You will not have to pay a fee to access your personal data (or to exercise any of the other rights). However, we may charge a reasonable fee if your request is clearly unfounded, repetitive or excessive. Alternatively, we may refuse to comply with your request in these circumstances.
We may need to request specific information from you to help us confirm your identity and ensure your right to access your personal data (or to exercise any of your other rights). This is a security measure to ensure that personal data is not disclosed to any person who has no right to receive it. We may also contact you to ask you for further information in relation to your request to speed up our response.
We try to respond to all legitimate requests within one month. Occasionally it may take us longer than a month if your request is particularly complex or you have made a number of requests. In this case, we will notify you and keep you updated.
Where we need to collect personal data by law, or under the terms of a contract we have with you and you fail to provide that data when requested, we may not be able to perform the contract we have or are trying to enter into with you. In this case, we may have to cancel your use of our Services but we will notify you if this is the case at the time.
The Website uses a feature of your web browser called a "cookie" -- a file that your browser places on your computer's hard drive to uniquely identify your computer.
The Website creates and then uses cookies to make log-in more convenient, to tell us whether you have previously visited the Website, to track your clicks through the Website, and to help us determine whether you came to the Website from a particular Internet link or advertisement.
Cookies can also be used to save and retrieve passwords and to save information on past usage of features and other preferences. We do not and cannot use cookies to retrieve personal information about you from your computer unless such information was knowingly and willingly provided by you.
Some of our business partners, sponsors, and advertisers also use cookies through the Website (for example, advertisers) to track the success of their advertising and marketing efforts, which is standard practice for many of the websites you may visit.
By your using this website, we imply that you have read this policy and agree to us sending you cookies.
You can generally activate or later deactivate the use of cookies through a functionality built into your web browser. To learn more about how to control cookie settings through your browser:
If you want to learn more about cookies, or how to control, disable or delete them, please visit http://www.aboutcookies.org for detailed guidance. In addition, certain third party advertising networks, including Google, permit users to opt out of or customize preferences associated with your internet browsing. To learn more about this feature from Google, click here.
Many jurisdictions require or recommend that website operators inform users/visitors as to the nature of cookies they utilize and, in certain circumstances, obtain the consent of their users to the placement of certain cookies.
Some features used on this website may involve a cookie being sent to your computer by a third party. For example, if you view or listen to any embedded audio or video content you may be sent cookies from the site where the embedded content is hosted. Likewise, if you share any content on this website through social networks (for example by clicking a Facebook “like” button or a “Tweet” button) you may be sent cookies from these websites. We do not control the setting of these cookies so please check the websites of these third-parties for more information about their cookies and how to manage them.
Cookies make sure that during your visit to our website the website keeps running smoothly and safely. The cookies also ensure that we can see how our website is used and how we can improve it. Furthermore, depending on your preferences our own cookies may be used to present you with targeted advertisements that match your personal interests.
These cookies are necessary for the website to function properly. Some of the following actions can be performed by using these cookies. - Store articles in a shopping cart for online purchases - Save your cookie preferences for this website - Saving language preferences - Log in to our portal. We need to check whether you are logged in.
These cookies are used to gather statistical information about the use of our website, also called analytics cookies. We use this data for performance and website optimization.
These cookies enable more functionality for our website visitors. These cookies can be set by our external service providers or our own website. The following functionalities may or may not be activated when you accept this category. - Live chat services - Watch online videos - Social media sharing buttons - Login to our website with social media
These cookies are set by external advertising partners and are used for profiling and tracking data across multiple websites. If you accept these cookies, we may show our advertisements on other websites based on your user profile and preferences. These cookies also save data about how many visitors have seen or clicked on our advertisements in order to optimize advertising campaigns.
These cookies are still in the classification process. They will show up in one on the following categories; Necessary, Performance, Functional or Advertising.
The Website may be, in whole or in part, an advertising supported Website, and when responding to a third party advertisement or offer, you may submit your information to such third party outside of our control.
We may also include social-media plugins like Facebook and Twitter buttons. We are in no way responsible for any of your activities in respect of your use of third party social media.
The Website may contain links to other websites that are not controlled by Rough Guides and are marked with a special character nearby. We are not responsible for the privacy practices of such other websites.
We encourage our users to be aware when they leave our Website and to read the privacy statements of each and every website that collects personally identifiable information.
This Privacy Policy applies solely to information collected by Rough Guides and the Website.
All information collected or provided may be transferred or assigned by Rough Guides in conjunction with a merger or the sale of all or a portion of Rough Guides (or similar event).
We may update this policy from time to time by publishing a new version on our website. You should check this page from time to time to ensure you agree with any changes to this policy.
We may notify you of changes to this policy by email.
Should you have an queries on our Privacy Policy please contact us:
Email: mail@roughguides.com
Address: Apa Group headquarters: 7 Bell Yard, London WC2A 2JR, United Kingdom
Website: www.roughguides.com