Privacy Policy

Below you will find the updated Privacy Policy for Hotels.com, which applies to any information provided or collected through this Hotels.com website and/or any Hotels.com application, including the Hotels.com mobile and tablet applications or any application on a social media or other website (each an "App"), each of which are provided by Hotels.com, L.P. 5400 LBJ Freeway, Suite 500, Dallas, Texas 75240, USA (“Hotels.com”, “we”, or “us”).

We understand that booking online involves significant trust on your part. We value your trust, and make it a high priority to ensure the security and confidentiality of the personal information you provide to us. Please read this policy to learn about our privacy practices.

• What information we collect from you
• How we use your information
• With whom we share your information
• How you can access and/or correct your information
• Your choices with respect to the collection and use of your information
• Cookies and other technologies
• Using the Hotels.com mobile phone and tablet Apps
• How we protect your information
• Children’s privacy
• External links
• Visiting our website from outside the United States
• Changes to this Privacy Policy
• How you can contact us

What information we collect from you

In General. We receive and store any information you enter on our website or give us in any other way, including via any App. This includes information that can identify you (“personal information”), including your first and last name, telephone number, postal and email addresses and billing information (such as credit card number, cardholder name, and expiration date). We may also request information about your hotel room preferences, and frequent flyer and car rental program information. You can choose not to provide information to us, but in general most of the information we request from you is required in order for you reserve a hotel, register as a member; book travel; complete a traveller profile; participate in a survey, contest, or sweepstakes; ask us a question; or initiate other transactions on our website or through any App.

Travel Companion Information. When you make a reservation for someone else through this website or any App, we will request personal information and travel preferences about that individual. It is your responsibility to obtain the consent of other individuals prior to providing us with their personal information and travel preferences, as any access to view or change their information will be available only through your account.

Information from Other Sources. We also may periodically lawfully obtain both personal and non-personal information about you from affiliated entities, business partners and other independent third-party sources and add it to our account information. Examples of information we may receive include: updated delivery and address information, purchase history, and demographic information. When we collect information about you from a third party, we ensure that appropriate consent has been obtained. By transacting on this site or through our Apps, you agree that we may collect such information for fraud prevent purposes.

Automatic Information. We automatically collect session information about your computer when you visit this website. For example, we will collect your IP address, Web browser software (such as Firefox, Safari, or Internet Explorer), and referring website. We also may collect information about your online activity, such as trips viewed and bookings made. We use this automatic information to customize your user experience; to inhibit fraud; to serve advertisements, special offers and other information that may be of interest to you; and for other legitimate purposes we bring to your attention. For more information, please see our “Cookies and other technologies” section. If you do not want Hotels.com to collect or use this session information, you can access the travel services we offer "offline" by booking travel through our call center. Please call 800-CA-HOTEL around the clock to speak to a representative personally.

Social Media. If you make use of any Hotels.com social media features, either on our website, through an App or otherwise through a social media provider, we may access information about you via that social media provider in accordance with their policies. For example, we offer the option to register with our website via the “Facebook Connect” feature, allowing you to register with our website using your Facebook account data without entering the required data manually on our webpage. When using a social media feature and if you have chosen to include it in your social media account, we may access information such as your name, profile picture, gender, birthday, email address, town or district and any other information you have chosen to make available. Depending on the privacy settings of you and your friends, we may access information that you provide to a social media provider regarding your respective locations (“Location Data”) to provide you with relevant content. Please note that your Location Data may also be shared with your friends on a social media provider in accordance with your privacy settings for that social media provider. We may also access information from social media providers about your use of an App that we run on their website.

How we use your information

We use sensitive billing information (such as cardholder name, credit card number, and expiration date) for the purpose of completing the hotel reservations you make on our website or through an App. We use other information about you for the following general purposes so long as you have given your consent: to provide you with the products and services you request; to provide you with your hotel booking confirmation and updates; to manage your account, including processing bills and providing travel notifications; to communicate with you in general; to respond to your questions and comments; to measure interest in and improve our products, services, website and our Apps; to notify you about special offers and products or services that may be of interest to you; to otherwise customize your experience with this website or our Apps; to reward you as part of any reward and recognition program you choose to join; to solicit information from you, including through surveys; to resolve disputes, collect fees, or troubleshoot problems; to prevent potentially prohibited or illegal activities; to enforce our Terms of Use; and as otherwise described to you at the point of collection.

Email Communications. We want to make it easy for you to take advantage of travel-related opportunities on our website and through our Apps. One way we do this is by sending you email messages that contain information about your hotel related interests if you consented to receiving email marketing communications. For example, if you search for a hotel in New York on our website but choose not to book a hotel, we may send you an email message telling you about our special deals for hotels in New York. We believe these email messages will provide you with useful information about travel-related special offers available through our website and our Apps. Please note that you will have the opportunity to choose not to receive these email messages in any such email we send.

Please review the “Your choices with respect to the collection and use of your information” section below.

With whom we share your information

We may share your information with the following entities:

• Suppliers such as hotel, airline, car rental, and activity providers, who fulfill your travel reservations. All Hotels.com services provided by a third-party supplier are described as such. By making a reservation through this site, you are authorizing us to disclose to suppliers the information required to complete the booking and deliver the related travel. These suppliers are not controlled by Expedia and personal information disclosed to them is subject to the applicable supplier's privacy policy and security practices. Therefore, we encourage you to review the privacy policies of any travel supplier whose products you purchase through this website or any App. Please note that these suppliers also may contact you as necessary to obtain additional information about you, facilitate your travel reservation, or respond to a review you may submit. While we may share anonymous reviews with our hotel suppliers, we will not share reviewer names or contact information unless you have explicitly told us that we may. We are not responsible for the hotel deducing your identity from the content of your review and contacting you directly.
• Third-party vendors who provide services or functions on our behalf, including credit card processing, business analytics, customer service, marketing, distribution of surveys or sweepstakes programs, and fraud prevention. We may also authorize third-party vendors to collect information on our behalf, including as necessary to operate features of our website or our Apps or to facilitate the delivery of online advertising tailored to your interests. Third-party vendors have access to and may collect information only as needed to perform their functions and are not permitted to share or use the information for any other purpose. They are also required to follow the same data security practices that we ourselves adhere to. Please note that these third party service providers may be established in countries that might not offer a level of protection for your personal information that is equivalent to the one offered in your country of residence. However, we will endeavor to protect all personal information we collect from you in accordance with strict data protection standards.
• Business partners with whom we may jointly offer products or services, or whose products or services may be offered on our website or through our Apps. You can tell when a third party is involved in a product or service you have requested because their name will appear, either alone or with ours. If you choose to access these optional services, we may share information about you, including your personal information, with those partners. Please note that we do not control the privacy practices of these third-party business partners.
• Referring websites if you were referred to this website from another site (for example, through a link you clicked on another site that directed you to this one), we may share some information about you with that referring website. We encourage you to review the privacy policies of any website that referred you here.
• Companies within our corporate family. We may share your personal information with our affiliated companies within the Expedia, Inc. family, listed at expediainc.com. This sharing enables us to provide you, if you have consented to it, with information about products and services, both travel-related and other, which we believe might interest you. To the extent that our parent company and corporate affiliates have access to your information, they will follow practices that are at least as restrictive as the practices described in this Privacy Policy. They also will comply with applicable laws governing the transmission of promotional communications and, at a minimum, give you an opportunity in any commercial email they send to choose not to receive such email messages in the future.
• Social media providers. When you access certain Hotels.com social media features through our website or Apps, you are sharing information with the social media provider (such as Facebook) and the information you share will be governed by their privacy policies (including that we may access such information via the social media provider). You may be able to modify your privacy settings for these social media providers. Please consult the privacy policy of the relevant social media provider for further information. If you connect your Hotels.com account to a social media provider, such as through “Facebook Connect”, we may make available on that social media provider information related to your use of Hotels.com, such as Welcome Rewards® loyalty credits you receive and reviews posted by you on Hotels.com. Such information may be published on that social media provider’s websites or services. Information made available on the social media provider will be attributed to the social media provider account to which your Hotels.com account is connected. You may choose to disable automatic publishing by the social media provider of such information by editing your privacy settings for that social media provider. We will not provide any other social media provider with access to your Hotels.com account number or information. If you connect your Hotels.com account to a social media provider, we may also share your user name and your profile picture from that social media provider to other Hotels.com members. You may choose to disable such sharing of information by editing your privacy settings on that social media provider.

We also may share your information:

• In response to subpoenas, court orders, or other legal process; with law enforcement agencies as required; to establish or exercise our legal rights; to defend against legal claims; or as otherwise required by law. In such cases we reserve the right to raise or waive any legal objection or right available to us.
• When we believe it is appropriate to investigate, prevent, or take action regarding illegal or suspected illegal activities; to protect and defend the rights, property, or safety of our company, this website or our Apps, our customers, or others; and in connection with our Terms of Service and other agreements.
• In connection with a corporate transaction, such as a divestiture, merger, consolidation, or asset sale, or in the unlikely event of bankruptcy.

Other than as set out above, you will be notified when personal information about you will be shared with third parties, and you will have an opportunity to choose not to have us share such information. We also may share aggregate or anonymous information with third parties, including advertisers and investors. For example, we may tell our advertisers the number of visitors our website receives or the most popular hotels and vacation destinations. This information does not contain any personal information and is used to develop content and services we hope you will find of interest.

How you can access and/or correct your information

You can access and update your contact information by visiting this website’s Account section. You can access other personal information or close your account by contacting us at the email address listed below. Please note that after you close an account, you will not be able to sign in or access any of your personal information using our online tools. However, you can open a new account at any time.

By providing your personal information to us through this website or any App, you accept that we may retain your information. We may continue to process account-related information in order to fulfil our legitimate business objectives, to comply with our legal and regulatory obligations, and for historical record and analytical purposes. We employ robust technical measures to prevent unauthorized access to account information.

If you do not hold an account with us or wish to contact us in relation to any personal information that is not displayed in your account, you may ask us to access, delete or modify the information that we hold about you by emailing us at the email address listed below. You can also contact us to request an explanation as to how we process your information, and you may revoke the consent to the processing of your information provided when accepting this Privacy Policy by sending an email to the address listed below.

Your choices with respect to the collection and use of your information

• As discussed above, you can choose not to provide us with any information, although it may be needed to book your hotel or to take advantage of certain features offered on this website or our Apps.
• You also can add or update information and close your account as described above.
• When you register as a member, you will be given a choice as to whether you want to receive email messages from us about special offers as well as email messages about products and services of selected third parties. As a registered member, you can modify your choice at any time on the Communication Preferences page. Whether registered as a member or not, you will also be given the opportunity to unsubscribe from commercial messages in any such email we send. Please note that we reserve the right to send you other communications, including service announcements and administrative messages, relating either to your account or to your transactions, without offering you the opportunity to opt out of receiving them.
• You may have the opportunity on our website or through our Apps to provide a mobile number in order to receive your hotel confirmation details.

Cookies and other technologies

Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer or mobile device when you visit almost all websites. Cookies do not recognise you personally and are not harmful to your computer or mobile device. They are used by websites you visit in order to improve your experience on the website, to provide us with analytics information that will help us improve our website generally, and to collect information about travel destinations of interest to you so that you may see travel ads more relevant to you.

For instance, we use cookies on our site to allow you to login without having to type your login name each time. Other cookies help us to understand what did and didn’t interest you about our website so we can provide you with features that are more relevant and useful to you next time you visit. We and some of our partners also use cookies on our site to measure the effectiveness of advertising on our site and how visitors use our site.

For more detailed information about the cookies that we and our partners serve through our website, please visit our cookie policy. Alternatively, if have any other questions about our use of cookies or other technologies, please email us using our customer service and feedback form and we’ll do our best to help.

Using the Hotels.com mobile phone and tablet Apps (the “Mobile Apps”)

When you use a Hotels.com Mobile App, we collect and use information about you in the same way and for the same purposes as we do when you use our website.

In addition to this, we also use some other information that we collect automatically when you use our Mobile Apps. Specifically:

• We collect information about Mobile App functionality that you access and use. This allows us to identify those areas of the Mobile App that are of interest to our customers so that we can refine and continuously improve the Mobile App. The information we collect for this purpose does not enable us to directly identify you.
• Each Mobile App also sends us the device's unique device identifier (or "UID"), a sequence of numbers or characters that are unique to your mobile device. We use this only on the first opening of the Mobile App so that we can confirm to our advertising networks the number of downloads resulting from clicks on their respective ad banners and other marketing tools.
• When you use a Mobile App's ’find hotels near your current location’ feature, we use information about your current location – provided by your mobile device using GPS or similar technologies – to show hotels nearby. We do not collect location data unless you expressly click on the ’find hotels near your current location’ feature, and you can switch off location data collection at any time through your phone settings menu.
• Each Mobile App will also send us error-reporting information in the event that it crashes or hangs. This enables us to investigate the error and to improve the stability of the Mobile App for future releases. As part of these error reports, the Mobile App sends us information about the mobile device type and version, the UID, the time the error occurred, the feature being used and the state of the application when the error occurred. We do not use this information for any purpose other than investigating and remedying the error.

You always have the ability to control what information a Mobile App sends to us. You can exercise this control either by changing the settings of the Mobile App under its setting menu or changing the settings of your mobile device. Alternatively, you can remove the Mobile App from your mobile device entirely and access our services through our website.

How we protect your information

We want you to feel confident about using this website and our Apps to make travel arrangements, and we are committed to protecting the information we collect. While no website or App can guarantee security, we have implemented appropriate administrative, technical, and physical security procedures to help protect the personal information you provide to us. For example, only authorized employees are permitted to access personal information, and they may only do so for permitted business functions. In addition, we use encryption when transmitting your sensitive personal information between your system and ours, and we employ firewalls and intrusion detection systems to help prevent unauthorized persons from gaining access to your information.

Children’s privacy

This is a general audience website and neither the website nor any App offer services directed to children. If we gain actual knowledge that a child under the age of 13 has provided any personal information to us without the parent’s or guardian’s consent, we will use that information only to respond directly to that child to inform him or her that we must have parental consent before receiving his or her personal information.

External links

If any part of this website or any App links you to other sites, those sites do not operate under this Privacy Policy. We recommend you examine the privacy statements posted on those other websites to understand their procedures for collecting, using, and disclosing personal information.

Visiting our website from outside the United States

If you are visiting our website from outside the United States, please be aware that your information may be transferred to, stored, and processed in the United States, where our servers are located and our central database is operated. The data protection and other laws of the United States and other countries might not be as comprehensive as those in your country, but please be assured that we take steps to ensure that your privacy is protected. By using our services, you understand that your information may be transferred to our facilities and those third parties with whom we share it as described in this Policy.

Changes to this Privacy Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy in the future. We will notify you about material changes to this Privacy Policy by sending a notice to the email address you provided to us or by placing a prominent notice on our website and/or through our Apps.

How you can contact us

If you have questions about either this Privacy Policy (or your travel planning or purchases), please email us or write to us at:

Email: Customer Care
Hotels.com, L.P.
Attn: Privacy Office
5400 LBJ Freeway
Suite 500
Dallas, Texas 75240
USA

This Privacy Statement is effective as of 02/11/13.