Depending on your device’s settings and permissions and your choice to participate in certain programs, we may use technology to track where you chose to download our app and to measure advertising effectiveness. When we use this kind of technology, we will use privacy enhancing technologies such as de-identification, pseudonymization, encryption and improved notice where possible.

Use of Personal Information

We use your personal information for various purposes described below, which depend on the site you visit or the app you use. 

Your Use of Online Sites, Apps, and Services:

• Book the requested travel or enable vacation property booking
• Provide services related to the booking and/or account
• Create, maintain, and update user accounts on our platform and authenticate you as a user
• Maintain your search and travel history, accommodation and travel preferences, and similar information about your use of Expedia Group’s platform and services, and as otherwise described in this Privacy Statement
• Enable and facilitate acceptance and processing of payments, coupons, and other transactions
• Administer loyalty and rewards programs
• Collect and enable booking-related reviews
• Help you to use our services faster and easier through features like the ability to sign-in using your account within the online services and sites of some of the Expedia Group companies

Communications and Marketing:

• Respond to your questions, requests for information, and process information choices
• Enable communication between you and the travel supplier like hotels and vacation property owners
• Contact you (such as by text message, email, phone calls, mail, push notifications, or messages on other communication platforms) to provide information like travel booking confirmations and updates, for marketing purposes, or for other purposes as described in this Privacy Statement
• Market our products and services
• Analyze information such as browsing and/or purchase history and use the result to optimize advertising in accordance with your interests and preferences
• Measure and analyze the effectiveness of our marketing and promotions
• Administer promotions like contests, sweepstakes, and similar giveaways

Other Business Purposes and Compliance

• Conduct surveys, market research, and data analytics
• Maintain, improve, research, and measure the effectiveness of our sites and apps, activities, tools, and services
• Monitor or record calls, chats, and other communications with our customer service team and other representatives, as well as platform communications between or among partners and travelers for quality control, training, dispute resolution, and as described in this Privacy Statement
• Create aggregated or otherwise anonymized or deidentified data, which we may use and disclose without restriction where permissible
• Promote security, verify identity of our customers, prevent and investigate fraud and unauthorized activities, defend against claims and other liabilities, and manage other risks
• Comply with applicable laws, protect our and our users’ rights and interest, defend ourselves, and respond to law enforcement, other legal authorities, and requests that are part of a legal process
• Comply with applicable security and anti-terrorism, anti-bribery, customs and immigration, and other such due diligence laws and requirements
• Operate our business using lawful business purposes and as permitted by law

Clickstream data

In certain instances, we may use clickstream data to render an illustration of your usage of our site. Clickstream data is the collection of a sequence of events that represent visitor actions on a website. We may reconstruct your site journey modeled on the timing and location of your actions. This data is primarily used for customer service purposes, to verify the legitimacy of a claim, or to defend ourselves. This data may also be used for other internal purposes such as improving the user experience on our website and identifying website malfunctions.

Sensitive Personal Information

We will only use your sensitive personal information for the purposes for which it was collected.

Lawful bases for processing

We will collect personal information from you only (i) where the personal information is necessary to perform a contract with you (e.g., manage your booking, process payments, or create an account at your request), (ii) where the processing is in our legitimate interests and not overridden by your rights (as explained below), or (iii) where we have your consent to do so (e.g., sending you marketing communications where consent is required). In some cases, we will have a legal obligation to collect personal information from you such as where it is necessary to use your transaction history to complete our financial and tax obligations under the law.

If we ask you to provide personal information to comply with a legal requirement or to perform a contract with you, we will make this clear at the relevant time and advise you whether the provision of your personal information is mandatory or not (as well as of the possible consequences if you do not provide your personal information). Certain countries and regions allow us to process personal information on the basis of legitimate interests. If we collect and use your personal information in reliance on our legitimate interests (or the legitimate interests of any third-party), this interest will typically be to operate or improve our platform and communicate with you as necessary to provide our services to you, for security verification purposes when you contact us, to respond to your queries, undertaking marketing, or for the purposes of potentially detecting or preventing illegal activities. 

We may use artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other automated decision-making to enhance your user experience and keep our site safe.

For example, we may use it in relation to:

• the sort order you see on our site,
• destinations, property or activity recommendations,
• flight price insights and alerts,
• the content you upload on our site (e.g., images of your properties) to ensure they meet our quality or formatting requirements, and to identify relevant amenities included in your listing,
• the reviews you share with us to ensure they do not contain identifiable personal information or to assess customer satisfaction,
• the prevention and detection of breach of our terms and conditions or other fraudulent activities to keep our site safe,
• our language and dialects within our virtual agents’ experience.

Automated decisions may be made by putting your personal information into a system and the decision is calculated using automatic processes.

We will not engage in automated decision-making that involves a decision with legal or similarly significant effects solely based on automated processing of personal information, unless you: (1) explicitly consented to the processing, (2) the processing is necessary for entering into a contract, or (3) when otherwise authorized by applicable law.

You may have rights in relation to automated decision making, including the ability to request a manual decision-making process instead or contest a decision based solely on automated processing. If you want to know more about your data protection rights, please see the Your Rights and Choices section below.

Sharing of Personal Information

We share your personal information as described below and in this Privacy Statement, and as permitted by applicable law.

• Expedia Group Companies. We share your personal information within the Expedia Group companies, listed at expediagroup.com. Expedia Group companies (either autonomously or as joint data controllers, where applicable) share access and use your personal information as described in this Privacy Statement.
• Third-party service providers. We share personal information with third-parties in connection with the delivery of services to you and the operation of our business (for example, to provide credit card processing, customer service, business analytics, and fraud prevention and compliance services, and to serve you with advertising tailored to your interests). These third-party service providers are required to protect personal information we share with them and may not use any directly identifying personal information other than to provide services we contracted them for. They are not allowed to use the personal information we share for purposes of their own direct marketing (unless you have separately consented with the third-party under the terms provided by the third-party).
• Travel suppliers. We share personal information with travel-related suppliers such as hotels, airlines, car-rental companies, insurance, vacation-rental property owners and managers, and where available, activity providers, rail, or cruise lines who fulfill your booking. Please note that travel suppliers may contact you to obtain additional information if and as required to facilitate your booking or to otherwise provide the travel or associated services.
• Business partners and offers.  If we promote a program or offer a service or product in conjunction with a third-party business partner, we will share your information with that partner to assist in marketing or to provide the associated product or service.  In most of those cases, the program or offer will include the name of the third-party business partner, either alone or with ours, or you will be redirected to the website of that business with notice. An example of such a business-partner relationship would be a third-party loyalty program for which you could earn points by completing a booking on our platform.
• Targeted Advertising. We may disclose your Automatically Collected Information to our third-party marketing partners for targeted advertising. This may be considered “sharing” data under California law. Subject to certain limitations, some US residents have the right to opt out of having their personal information shared for this purpose. For more information, see the Your Rights and Choices section below. You should note that by opting out of these types of disclosures, you may limit our ability to customize your experience with content that may be of interest to you or to provide you with a better travel experience. View our Cookie Statement, included below in this Privacy Statement, for more information on our use of tracking technology for the purposes of targeted advertising. 
• Other Third-Parties. When you access certain features like Facebook’s “Like” button or a single sign-on that allows you to login with your social media credentials to our online services, you will share information with the third-party, like a social media company, such as the fact that you have visited or interacted with us. In the European Economic Area (EEA), Switzerland, and United Kingdom (UK) we will not load social media sharing or sign-on buttons on our website unless and until you accept our use of cookies and similar technologies. For more information, see our Cookie Statement, included below in this Privacy Statement. The third-party provider may combine this information with other information they have about you. The personal information shared will be governed by the third-party provider’s privacy policy (including any personal information we may access via the third-party provider). The third-party providers should inform you about how you can modify your privacy settings on their site.
• Legal rights and obligations. We may disclose your personal information and associated records to enforce our policies;  as necessary to satisfy our tax or other regulatory reporting requirements, including the remission of certain taxes in the course of processing payments; or where we are permitted (or believe in good faith that we are required) to do so by applicable law, such as in response to a subpoena or other legal request,  in connection with actual or proposed litigation, or to protect and defend our property, people and other rights or interests.
• Corporate transactions. We may share your personal information in connection with a corporate transaction, such as a divestiture, merger, consolidation, assignments or asset sale, or in the unlikely event of bankruptcy. In the case of any acquisition, we will inform the buyer it must use your personal information only for the purposes disclosed in this Privacy Statement.

Your Rights and Choices

You have certain rights and choices with respect to your personal information, as described below:

• If you have an account with us, you may change your communication preferences by either (1) logging in and updating the information in your account (not available for all Expedia Group companies) or (2) contacting us here.
• You can control our use of certain cookies by following the guidance in our Cookie Statement, which is included below in this Privacy Statement.
• You can access, amend, inquire about deletion of, or update the accuracy of your information at any time by either logging into your account or contacting us here
• If you no longer wish to receive marketing and promotional emails, you may unsubscribe by clicking the ‘unsubscribe’ link in the email. You can also log into your account to change communication settings (not available for all Expedia Group companies) or contacting us here. Please note that if you choose to unsubscribe from or opt out of marketing emails, we may still send you important transactional and account-related messages from which you will not be able to unsubscribe
• For our mobile apps, you can view and manage notifications and preferences in the settings menus of the app and of your operating system
• If we are processing your personal information on the basis of consent, you may withdraw that consent at any time by contacting us. Withdrawing your consent will not affect the lawfulness of any processing that occurred before you withdrew consent and it will not affect our processing of your personal information that is conducted in reliance on a legal basis other than consent

Certain countries and regions provide their residents with additional rights relating to personal information. These additional rights vary by country and region and may include the ability to:

• Request a copy of your personal information
• Request information about the purpose of the processing activities
• Delete your personal information
• Object to our use or disclosure of your personal information
• Restrict the processing of your personal information
• Opt-out of the sale of your personal information
• Port your personal information
• Request information about the logic involved in our automated decision-making used in our fraud prevention practices and the result of such decisions

For more information on what data subject rights may be available to you, please click here.

For questions about privacy, your rights and choices, and in order for you, or (where applicable) your authorized agent to make a request to amend or update your information, or to inquire about deletion of your information, please contact us here.

In addition to the above rights, you may have the right to complain to a data protection authority about our collection and use of your personal information. However, we encourage you to contact us first so we can do our best to resolve your concern. You may submit your request to us using the information in the Contact Us section.

We respond to all requests we receive from individuals wanting to exercise their personal data protection rights in accordance with applicable data protection laws. Should you have the right to appeal a decision to not take action on a request under applicable law, instructions on how to make that appeal will be included in our response to you.

International Data Transfer

The personal information we process may be accessed from, processed or transferred to countries other than the country in which you reside. Those countries may have data protection laws that are different from the laws of your country.

The servers for our platform are located in the United States, and the Expedia Group companies and third-party service providers operate in many countries around the world. When we collect your personal information, we may process it in any of those countries. Our employees may access your personal information from various countries around the world. The transferees of your personal data may also be located in countries other than the country in which you reside.

We have taken appropriate steps and put safeguards in place to help ensure that any access, processing and/or transfer of your personal information remains protected in accordance with this Privacy Statement and in compliance with applicable data protection law. Such measures provide your personal information with a standard of protection that is at least comparable to that under the equivalent local law in your country, no matter where your data is accessed from, processed and/or transferred to.

Such measures include the following:

• Adequacy decisions of the European Commission confirming an adequate level of data protection in respective non-EEA countries.
• Transferee countries’ participation in the APEC-CBPR forum. Further detail on Expedia Group’s participation in such forum may be found in the “APEC Cross Border Privacy Rules System Participation” section below.
• Ensuring that the third-party partners, vendors and service providers to whom data transfers are made have appropriate mechanisms in place to protect your personal information. For instance, our agreements signed with our third-party partners, vendors and service providers incorporate strict data transfer terms (including, where applicable, the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses issued by the European Commission and/or United Kingdom, for transfers from the EEA/UK), and require all contracting parties to protect the personal information they process in accordance with applicable data protection law. Our agreements with our third-party partners, vendors and service providers may also include, where applicable, their certification under the EU-U.S. and/or Swiss-U.S. Privacy Shield certification, or reliance on the service provider's Binding Corporate Rules, as defined by the European Commission.
• Intra-group agreements in place for our Group companies which incorporate strict data transfer terms (including, where applicable, Standard Contractual Clauses issued by the European Commission and/or United Kingdom, for transfers from the EEA/UK) and require all group companies to protect the personal information they process in accordance with applicable data protection law.
• Carrying out periodic risk assessments and implement various technological and organization measures to ensure compliance with relevant laws on data transfer.

Privacy Shield

Certain Expedia Group U.S. affiliates have certified to the EU-U.S. and Swiss-U.S. Privacy Shield frameworks and that we adhere to the Privacy Shield Principles of Notice, Choice, accountability for Onward Transfers, Security, Data Integrity and Purpose Limitation, Access, and Recourse, Enforcement, and Liability for personal information from the EU, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Such Expedia Group U.S. affiliates will continue to adhere to the Privacy Shield frameworks and Principles even though the CJEU determined in July 2020 that the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield framework is no longer an adequate transfer mechanism for the transfer of EU personal information to the U.S. In addition, Expedia Group maintains intra-group Standard Contractual Clauses where applicable to cover the transfer of EU personal information to the U.S. Our certifications can be found here. For more information about the Privacy Shield principles, please visit: www.privacyshield.gov. For more on our adherence to the Privacy Shield Frameworks, please see information posted here.

APEC Cross Border Privacy Rules System Participation

Hotwire, Inc.’s privacy practices, described in this Privacy Statement, comply with the APEC Cross Border Privacy Rules System. The APEC CBPR system provides a framework for organizations to ensure protection of personal information transferred among participating APEC economies. More information about the APEC framework can be found here.

Security

We want you to feel confident about using our platform and all associated tools and services, and we are committed to taking appropriate steps to protect the information we collect. While no company can guarantee absolute security, we do take reasonable steps to implement appropriate physical, technical, and organizational measures to protect the personal information that we collect and process.  

Our cybersecurity team develops and deploys technical security controls and measures to ensure responsible data collection, storage, and sharing that is proportionate to the data’s level of confidentiality or sensitivity. We take efforts to continuously implement and update security measures to protect your information from unauthorized access, loss, destruction, or alteration. We hold our data-handling partners to equally high standards.

Record Retention

We will retain your personal information in accordance with all applicable laws, for as long as it may be relevant to fulfill the purposes set forth in this Privacy Statement, unless a longer retention period is required or permitted by law. We will deidentify, aggregate, or otherwise anonymize your personal information if we intend to use it for analytical purposes or trend analysis over longer periods of time.

When we delete your personal information, we use industry standard methods to ensure that any recovery or retrieval of your information is impossible. We may keep residual copies of your personal information in backup systems to protect our systems from malicious loss. This data is inaccessible unless restored, and all unnecessary information will be deleted upon restoration.

The criteria we use to determine our retention periods include:

• The duration of our relationship with you, including any open accounts you may have with Expedia Group companies, or recent bookings or other transactions you have made on our platform
• Whether we have a legal obligation related to your personal information, such as laws requiring us to keep records of your transactions with us
• Whether there are any current and relevant legal obligations affecting how long we will keep your personal information, including contractual obligations, litigation holds, statutes of limitations, and regulatory investigations
• Whether your information is needed for secure backups of our systems

Cookie Statement

Types of cookies and similar technologies

Cookies

Cookies are small pieces of text sent as files to your computer or mobile device when you visit most websites. Cookies may be delivered by us (first party cookies) or delivered by a third-party partner or supplier (third-party cookies). Cookies are either session cookies or persistent cookies. Session cookies enable sites to recognize and link the actions of a user during a browsing session and expire at the end of each session. Persistent cookies help us recognize you as an existing user and these cookies are stored on your system or device until they expire, although you can delete them before the expiration date.

Other similar technologies

·       Web beacons, gifs, and clear gifs are tiny graphics, each with a unique identifier that are embedded invisibly on sites and in emails. Web beacons allow us to know if a certain page was visited or if ad banners on our sites and other sites are effective. We also use web beacons in our HTML-based emails to let us know whether our emails have been opened by recipients, which helps us to gauge the effectiveness of certain communications, promotions, and marketing campaigns.

·       Proximity based beacons send one-way signals over very short distances, to communicate with associated mobile apps installed on your phone. They can notify you, for example, about experiences related to your trip and can alert you to related deals or promotions. Beacons communicate with your device only when you are in close proximity and only if you have given consent within the relevant mobile application.

·       Pixels are small objects embedded into a web page that are not visible to the user. We use pixels to deliver cookies to your computer, facilitate the log-in process, monitor the activity on our sites, and deliver online advertising.

·       Tags are small pieces of HTML code that tell your browser to request certain content generated by an ad server. We use tags to show you relevant advertising and promotions.

·       Scripts are pieces of JavaScript code that launch automatically when certain webpages load, to determine whether users view associated advertisements.

·       Local Storage Objects, such as HTML 5, are used to store content and preferences. Third-parties with whom we partner to provide certain features on our site to display advertising based upon your web browsing activity use Local Storage Objects to collect and store information.

All of the technologies described above will be collectively referred to in this Cookie Statement as “cookies”.

Expedia Group’s use of cookies

At Expedia Group, we use cookies for a number of reasons, including to:

· Help us improve your experience when visiting our sites

· Fulfill transactions and ensure our sites perform as intended

· Remember your preferences, such as language, region, or currency

· Provide you with relevant advertising and analyze performance of the ads

· Enable you to return to previous travel searches

· Identify errors on our sites

· Help with data protection and potentially detect and investigate malicious of fraudulent activity

· Help us understand traffic to our site, including time and date of the visit, time and date of the last visit, and other information

· Analyze how well our sites are performing

Types of information collected by cookies

The types of information that we collect through cookies include:

· IP address

· Device ID

· Viewed pages

· Browser type

· Browsing information

· Operating system

· Internet Service Provider

· Whether you have responded to, or interacted with, an advertisement

· Referring or referred links or URLs

· Features used and activities engaged in on our sites and in our apps

Types and functions of cookies

Essential Cookies

Certain cookies are required or “essential” for our sites to function as intended. Essential cookies are necessary for you to navigate our site and use certain features like logging in to your account and managing your bookings. These cookies are also used to remember security settings that allow access to particular content. Lastly, we use essential cookies to collect information on which web pages visitors go to most, so we can improve our online services. You are not able to opt out of essential cookies.

Other Types of Cookies

We also use other types of cookies to make our site engaging and useful to you:

• Functional Cookies. We want to make sure when you visit our site, your preferences (such as your preferred language), settings, and previous searches are remembered. Functional cookies enhance your experience on any Expedia Group company’s site.

• Performance Cookies. We use performance cookies to: 

·     Understand our site’s performance and how it is used, including the number of visitors, how long you stay on the site, and which parts of the site you visit. We can see details about how visitors interacted with the site, like the number of clicks visitors made on a given page, their mouse movements and scrolling activity, the search words visitors used, and the text visitors enter into various fields

·    Test different designs and features for our site

·    Monitor how our visitors reach our sites

·    Determine effectiveness of our advertising

·    Improve our services, including your experience on our site

For analytics, our third-party service providers may use cookies to perform their services and may combine the information that they collect about you on our sites with other information that they have collected. For example, we use Google Analytics cookies to monitor the performance of our sites. Our ability to use and share information collected by Google Analytics about your visit to our sites is restricted by the Google Analytics Terms of Use and the Google Privacy Policy. This Cookie Statement does not cover such third-parties’ use of your information.

Some analytics cookies can perform tasks essential and/or functional to online services like enabling site improvements and testing changes on a site.  

• Targeting Cookies. Expedia Group and our third-party advertising partners may use advertising cookies to show you advertisements both on and off our sites that are based on your interests. We may allow third-parties to collect information about your online activities through cookies to perform their services and may combine the information that they collect about you on our sites with other information that they have collected. These third-parties include business partners who collect information when you view or interact with one of (1) their advertisements on our sites or (2) our advertising or booking information on their sites and advertising networks, which collect information about your interests when you view or interact with one of the advertisements or tracking mechanisms they place on many different sites on the Internet. Our partners may make assumptions about your interests, characteristics, or preferences and add you to groups based on those assumptions in order to show you tailored advertisements. Expedia Group does not have access to the cookies these third-parties may use to collect information about your interests, and the information practices of these third-parties are not covered by this Cookie Statement, part of our Privacy Statement. Some of these companies are members of the Network Advertising Initiative, which offers a single location to opt out of ad targeting from member companies. To learn more, please click here and here.

Your information choices

You can choose not to receive tailored online advertising on this site and other sites and learn more about opting out of having your information used for tailored advertising purposes by accessing one of the following resources:

•          For U.S. and rest of world:

Note that if you choose not to receive tailored ads, you will still see online advertisements, but they will be general and less relevant to you.

How can you manage your cookies?

You can set or amend your web browser controls to accept or refuse cookies whenever you like, but please remember if you do choose to reject cookies, your access to some of the functionality and areas of our site may be restricted.

Do-Not-Track Signals and Similar Mechanisms.

Some web browsers may transmit "do-not-track" signals to sites with which the browser communicates. Because of differences in how web browsers incorporate and activate this feature, it is not always clear whether users intend for these signals to be transmitted, or whether users are even aware of them. Participants in the leading Internet standards-setting organization that is addressing this issue are in the process of determining what, if anything, sites should do when they receive such signals. We currently do not take action in response to these signals. If and when a final standard is established and accepted, we will reassess our sites’ responses to these signals and make appropriate updates to this Cookie Statement.

Contact Us

If you have any questions or concerns about our use of your personal information, or wish to inquire about our personal information handling practices, and exercise your rights to access, correct or inquire about deletion of personal information, please contact us via the Privacy Section on our Customer Services Portal here. For a list of the Expedia Group companies, click here.

For more information about the data controller(s) (and joint controllers, where applicable)  and/or Representative for personal information we process, please click here.

Updates to Privacy Statement

We may update this Statement in response to changing laws or technical or business developments. If we propose to make any material changes, we will notify you by means of a notice on this page. You can see when this Privacy Statement was last updated by checking the “last updated” date displayed at the top of this Statement.