Privacy Policy

 

Kind Traveler, PBC (“Kind Traveler,” “we” or “us” or “our”), understands your concerns about privacy and how your information is used and safeguarded, and want to provide you with more information on these topics.  This Privacy Policy describes the practices, policies and procedures related to our Website located at www.kindtraveler.com (the “Website”), including the types of personal information we collect on the Website, how we may use that information, with whom we share it, and the choices you have regarding our collection, use and disclosure of your information. Please note that this Privacy Policy applies only to our online information-gathering and dissemination practices, and does not apply to any of our practices conducted offline.   By visiting the Website, you are accepting the practices, policies and procedures described herein, and you are further indicating that you agree to be bound by the terms of this Privacy Policy. If you do not agree to the terms of this Privacy Policy, please do not visit or use the Website.  We may update this Policy from time to time, so please check this Policy periodically for changes. If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, please do not hesitate to contact us, at [email protected].

 


 

SUMMARY

The notifications provided by this Privacy Policy include:

  • What personally identifiable information we collect from you through the Website,
  • how the information is used,
  • with whom the information may be shared,
  • what choices are available to you regarding collection, use and distribution of the information,
  • the kind of procedures we employ in an effort to hinder the unauthorized access, use or disclosure of information you provide to us,
  • information related to third-party websites,
  • how you can learn about changes to our privacy policies, practices and procedures

 


 

THE INFORMATION WE COLLECT

Personal Information You Provide And How It Is Used: When you visit our Website, you may provide us with personally identifying information (such as name, address, e-mail address, telephone number, and/or credit/debit card information) and other information to Kind Traveler on a voluntary basis, as more particularly described below. We do not knowingly collect sensitive personal information, such as Social Security numbers or information about medical or health conditions. Please do not send sensitive personal or confidential information to us directly through the Website, or by email to any of the contact email addresses listed on the Website.

We will retain your personally identifiable information for as long as your account with the Website is active and as needed to provide services to you, and we may retain certain information after your account is deactivated, as set forth more fully below.

Registering an Account: When you register, you will be prompted to create a username and password, and to provide certain personally identifiable information to create your profile, including your first and last name, email address, social media handles, telephone number, billing address, and profile picture. You will have the option to provide additional personally identifiable information when you create your profile, such as demographic information, which may include your age, date of birth, gender, and charitable interests. You may update your profile at any time by logging into your account. We will use this information to create, manage and maintain your account on the Website, and to communicate with you about our partners, products, services, offers, events and promotions, and to offer you information about charities, properties, products and services we believe may be of interest to you.

You may also create an account on the Website through third-party login services, such as Facebook Connect. If you choose to create an account and access the Website through Facebook Connect, certain personally identifying information that you provide to Facebook may be accessible to Kind Traveler, including your profile picture (all as set forth in Facebook’s terms and policies). Kind Traveler may use any personally identifying information received through Facebook Connect in accordance with this Privacy Policy.

“Give and Get” Platform: We collect and use information about you in order to process and disburse contributions made to designated charities, to process and deliver discounts for use at selected hotels, to contact you about transactions made through the Website, and to maintain a record of your transactions. Such information includes your name, address, email address, and phone number. Your name and contact information will be provided to the charity or charities you support, and to the hotels, in order to allow the hotel to process your discounts. If you do not wish share your name and contact information with the charity or charities you support through the Website or you choose to make your donation anonymously, Kind Traveler will not share your name or contact information. We may periodically contact you via the information provided to us by you, but you may opt out at any time from such communications.

Processing of Payment Transactions: In order to process contribution and purchase transactions made through the Website and charge your credit card, our third-party payment processors, Authorize.net or PayPal, requires that you provide certain personal information.  Such information includes your name, billing address, email and credit card information. Some or all of this information may be retained by Authorize.net or PayPal for a period of time.  Any information that you provide in conjunction with, or related to, a contribution transaction, will be treated in accordance with the processor’s privacy policy, and we recommend that you review this policy for additional information.

Invitations: The Website provides you with the option to invite your friends and contacts to join Kind Traveler, by providing their names and email addresses, or by providing Kind Traveler with access to your social media networks. We will use this information to get in touch with your contacts to invite them to register an account on the Website, and may periodically contact them via the contact information provided by you, provided they have not opted out from receiving such communications.

Ratings/Reviews: When you post a rating or review to the “Ratings” section of a hotel microsite, only your first name and last initial will be displayed publicly, unless you include personally identifying information in your posted review. Please do not post any personally identifying information or other sensitive or confidential information in the “Ratings” sections of the Website, or on any other publicly-accessible area of the Website. 

Flash sales/Sweepstakes/Promotions: If you choose to participate in an event, flash sale, sweepstakes, or other promotion (“Promotions”) offered through the Website, we may collect additional personal information from you, which will be used to manage your participation in our Promotions, and which may be shared with third parties, including Promotion sponsors or partners.

Mailing Lists/eNewsletters: When you register an account with Kind Traveler, you may choose to receive occasional email updates from us.  You can also sign up independently to join our mailing list, and we will ask you provide your email address and your first and last name. If at any time you would like to unsubscribe from our email list, you may do so by clicking on the “unsubscribe” link located at the bottom of our emails or by emailing [email protected] with "unsubscribe" in the subject heading and we will remove your name from our lists. We will act quickly to implement such requests but please note there may be time lags of up to a month to remove names from our database.

Blogs/Social Media: We collect information and content, including photographs and testimonials regarding Kind Traveler and its partners that you make publicly available by interacting with us through Kind Traveler blogs or social media accounts. We may use this information to promote your activities through various social media outlets/venues, including by “retweeting” or “sharing” your content.  We may also publish any testimonials you submit, including on our websites and blogs, and on social media; if we choose to publish your testimonial, we will include only your first name, last initial, city and state.

Contact Us: If you contact us, please provide your first and last name, and email address.  We will use the information you provide to respond to your questions or requests and to provide customer support.

Account Deactivation: You may deactivate your account at any time by using the “Deactivate Account” link in your profile. When you deactivate your account, Kind Traveler may retain your personally identifying information for a limited period of time as needed to comply with our legal and regulatory obligations, resolve disputes, investigate or prevent fraud and other inappropriate activity, to enforce our agreements, and as necessary to protect our rights. After a period of time, your personal information may be anonymized and aggregated, and then may be held by us as long as necessary for us to provide our services effectively, but our use of the anonymized data will be solely for analytic purposes.

Personal Data Deletion: If you would like to request that your data be deleted from our system, please contact us at [email protected].

 


 

PERSON AND NON-PERSONAL INFORMATION WE COLLECT BY AUTOMATED MEANS AND HOW WE USE IT

We collect certain personal and non-personal information by automated means when you visit the Website. We collect this information through various means such as "cookies," "web beacons" and IP addresses, as further explained below.

Personal information collected may include shopping & charitable contribution behaviors and preferences, a record of the purchases or contributions you make on Website, and location information, such as the real-time geographic location of the device on which you install our mobile applications. When you use a Kind Traveler application on your mobile device or participate in social media with Kind Traveler, you may choose not to share your geo-location details with us by adjusting the device’s location services settings. 

Non-personal information we collect may include the numbers and frequency of visitors to the Website, pages visited and similar data, information about the devices our visitors use to access the Internet (such as the IP address and the device, browser and operating system type), URLs that refer users to our Website, dates and times of visits to our Website, actions taken on our Website (such as page views and site navigation patterns), general geographic locations (such as country and city) of our visitors, and search terms that visitors use to reach our Website. If gathered, this data is used in the aggregate, and not in a manner that is intended to identify you personally. This type of aggregate information may be shared with third parties at any time.

We may use information collected by automated means to tailor our products and services to suit your personal interests and the manner in which visitors use our Website, to operate, evaluate and improve our business and the products and services we offer, to analyze and enhance our marketing communications and strategies (including by identifying when emails sent to you have been received and read), to analyze trends and statistics regarding visitors’ use of our sites, mobile applications and social media assets, and the purchases visitors make on our sites, to protect against and prevent fraud, unauthorized transactions, claims and other liabilities, and manage risk exposure, including by identifying potential hackers and other unauthorized users, and to enforce our Website Terms of Use.

Cookies: A cookie is a piece of information that a web server may place on your computer when you visit a website. Cookies are commonly used by websites to improve the user experience.  Many cookies last only through a single website session, or visit. Others may have an expiration date, or may remain on your computer until you delete them. Kind Traveler uses "session cookies" so that we can properly verify a user's identity as they move from one page to the next, including hotel microsites and charity pages. For our hotel partners, we use "session cookies" and "persistent cookies" in addition to verifying personal information, so that we can provide secure access to user information. We may also use cookies for other purposes, including to uniquely identify the electronic shopping cart/basket you may create on our Website and enable you to retrieve shopping baskets you previously created.  We also may use cookies to identify and authenticate visitors, to maintain continuity during a user session, to gather data about the usage of our website for research and other purposes, or to store a user name or encrypted identification number so that you do not have to provide this information every time you return to our Website.  

Most browsers will tell you how to stop accepting new cookies, how to be notified when you receive a new cookie, and how to disable existing cookies. Please note, however, that without cookies you may not be able to take full advantage of all the features on our Website. Our cookies do not gather personally identifiable information. In some cases, Kind Traveler may also use another company to operate web servers for our Website.  Kind Traveler uses the cookie information gathered by these companies in the same manner as stated in this Privacy Policy.

Web Beacons: Certain pages on the Website contain "web beacons" (also known as Internet tags, pixel tags and clear GIFs). These web beacons allow third parties to obtain information such as the IP address of the computer that downloaded the page on which the beacon appears, the URL of the page on which the beacon appears, the time the page containing the beacon was viewed, the type of browser used to view the page, and the information in cookies set by the third party. Web beacons also may be used to track whether you have opened an HTML email. When the email is opened, a part of the code that makes up the HTML page calls a web server to load the web beacon that then generates a record showing that the email has been viewed. Web beacons may also recognize when the email was opened, how many times it was forwarded and which URLs (links within the email) were clicked.

IP Addresses: When you visit and interact with the Website, Kind Traveler and third parties with whom we have contracted to provide services for us may collect Internet Protocol addresses (each an "IP Address"), as well as browser type, Internet service provider (ISP), referring/exit pages, platform type, date/time stamp, and page navigation. An IP Address is a unique identifier number that certain electronic devices use to identify and to communicate with each other on the Internet; your Internet Service Provider automatically assigns an IP Address to the computer that you are using.  We gather this information to track web site visitor movement in the aggregate, and to gather broad demographic information for aggregate use. Our goal in gathering this information is to learn how our customers and the public are using our service. We may use this information to enhance our Website or for other lawful purposes.

Publicly-Available Information: We may combine the information we collect from you voluntarily or by automated means with publicly available information and information we receive from our partners and other third parties. We may use that combined information to enhance and personalize your experience with us, to communicate with you about charities, hotels, products, services and events that may be of interest to you, for other promotional purposes, and for other purposes described in this policy.

 


 

HOW WE MAY SHARE YOUR INFORMATION

We may disclose all of the information (described herein) that we collect, as stated in this Privacy Policy, including in accordance with the terms set forth in this section.  Please note that when you select a hotel from which to receive a discount and make a contribution to a charity in exchange for a discount through the “Give and Get” platform, certain personal information about you will be shared with the hotel (in order to allow the hotel to process your discount), and with the charity (unless you opt-out), in order to allow the charity to process your contribution and to contact you in the future. We may also share the personal information we collect with our partners, ad network vendors and their participants, and other third parties for the purposes described in this Privacy Policy, including to allow these third parties to communicate with you about products and services, offers, events and promotions that we believe may be of interest to you.

Otherwise, we do not reveal personally identifiable information about you to third parties for their independent use unless: (1) you expressly authorize Kind Traveler to do so, (2) it is necessary to allow Kind Traveler and its service providers or agents to provide services on Kind Traveler’s behalf, (3) in order to provide products or services to you, (4) it is disclosed to entities (such as Omniture, Google Analytics, Alexa) that collect information about user traffic on our sites and mobile applications, and/or perform marketing or data aggregation services for Kind Traveler, (5) it is necessary in the event that Kind Traveler sells, merges or transfers all or a portion of its business or assets to another entity.  Following such a sale, merger or transfer, you may contact the entity to which we transferred your personal information with any inquiries concerning the processing of that information. Kind Traveler may also share your information with third parties where Kind Traveler is required or permitted to do so for any or all of the following reasons: (i) to comply with a subpoena, legal process, government request or any other legal obligation, (ii) to prevent, investigate, detect, or prosecute criminal offenses or attacks on the technical integrity of the Website or our network, and/or (iii) to protect the rights, privacy, property, business, or safety of Kind Traveler, their partners and employees, the visitors of the Website, or the public

 


 

ONLINE ADVERTISING

On our Website, we may collect information about your online activities to provide advertising about products and services tailored to your individual interests.  You may see certain promotions or ads on our Website or on other sites because we participate in advertising networks. Ad networks allow us to target our advertising to users through demographic, behavioral and contextual means.  These networks track your online activities over time by collecting information through automated means, including through the use of cookies, web server logs, web beacons and other methods.  The networks use this information to show you advertisements for Kind Traveler and our partners that are tailored to your individual interests.  The information our ad network vendors collect includes information about your visits to websites that participate in the vendors’ advertising networks, such as the pages or advertisements you have viewed, and the actions you take on the sites.  This data collection and ad targeting take place both on our Website and on third-party websites that participate in the ad networks.  This process also helps us track the effectiveness of our marketing efforts.

 

To request that our ad network vendors not use your data to deliver targeted advertising to you, please contact us at [email protected].

 


 

HOW WE ATTEMPT TO SAFEGUARD YOUR INFORMATION

We maintain administrative, technical and physical safeguards for the Website designed to protect against loss, misuse or unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration or destruction of the personal information that we collect from you. For example, we use Secure Sockets Layer encryption to protect certain transaction information while in transit. We also restrict access to personal information collected about you on the Website to our employees, those who are otherwise specified in this Privacy Policy, or others who need to know that information to provide services to you or in the course of conducting our business operations or activities.  However, no website can guarantee security. Thus, while we have established and maintain what we believe to be reasonable procedures to protect the confidentiality, security, and integrity of personally identifying information obtained through the Website and we strive to protect your personal information, we cannot ensure or warrant the security of any information you transmit to us. Therefore, you understand, acknowledge, and agree that you transmit certain personal information over this Website at your own risk.

To further protect yourself, you should safeguard your Kind Traveler account user name and password and not share that information with anyone.  You should also sign off your account and close your browser window when you have finished your visit to our Website.  Please note that we will never ask for your Kind Traveler account user name or password via email.


ACCESS AND CORRECTION

You may obtain a copy of certain personal information we maintain about you or update or correct inaccuracies in that information using the online account you may establish on our websites.  In addition, if you believe other personal information we maintain about you is inaccurate, you may request that we correct or amend the information by contacting us as indicated in the “How to Contact Us” section of this Privacy Policy.  If we deny an access request, we will notify you of the reasons for the denial.

 


 

CHILDREN’S PRIVACY

We do not knowingly collect, use, or disclose personally identifiable information about visitors less than 13 years of age. The minimum age to use the Website is 18. If you are under the age of 18, you are expressly prohibited from accessing/viewing this Website.  If you are the parent or guardian of a child under 18 years of age and believe that they have disclosed personally identifiable information to us, please contact us at [email protected] so that we may delete your child’s information.

 


 

THIRD PARTY WEBSITES

We may provide links to third-party websites as a service to you or in order to provide you additional information related to the transactions and activities that occur on the Website.   Please be aware that we cannot control and are not responsible for the information collection, use, and disclosure practices of such websites. We encourage you to review and understand the privacy practices and policies, if any, of these websites before providing any personally identifying information to them.  We are not responsible for the content or information of these websites, any products or services that may be offered through these websites, or any other use of the linked websites.

 


 

FUTURE REVISIONS

We reserve the right to revise this Privacy Policy at any time by updating this posting. Please check back regularly to see if there have been any changes to this policy, which you can determine by reviewing the Effective Date listed below. By continuing to use the Website after those changes become effective, you agree to be bound by the revised Privacy Policy

 


 

SPECIAL NOTICES

Notice to California Residents: California Civil Code Section 1798.83 permits Website users who are California residents to request and obtain from us once a year, free of charge, information about the personal information (if any) we disclosed to third parties for direct marketing purposes in the preceding calendar year. If applicable, this information would include a list of the categories of personal information that was shared and the names and addresses of all third parties with which we shared information in the immediately preceding calendar year. If you are a California resident and would like to request this information, please contact us or write to us at [email protected].

Do Not Track Notice Some web browsers incorporate a “Do Not Track” feature that signals to websites that you visit that you do not want to have your online activity tracked.  How browsers communicate and respond to the Do Not Track signal is not yet uniform. For this reason, like many web websites, the Website does not currently respond to or alter its practices when it receives a Do Not Track signal. Please note that third parties may collect personal information about your online activities over time and across different websites when you visit our Website or other online websites and services. To find out more about "Do Not Track," you may wish to visit http://www.allaboutdnt.com.

 


 

HOW TO CONTACT US

If you have any questions or comments about this Privacy Policy, or if you would like us to update information we have about you or your preferences, please contact us by email at [email protected].  You also may write to us at:

Kind Traveler, PBC
Attn: KindTraveler.com
P.O. Box 1164
Malibu, California 90265

Phone: 310.873.3294

 


 

PRIVACY POLICY EFFECTIVE DATE

This Privacy Policy is effective as of April 13, 2022.