Away.com's Privacy Pledge

At Away.com, we are concerned about your privacy. Keeping the privacy of our members and earning and retaining the trust of our customers is good business for us. Thus, we have written this pledge to inform you about our privacy practices.

We want to provide you with information about travel, specific trips, books, and other offers that are best suited to your needs. To do this, we sometimes ask you to provide personal information to us. Our philosophy is that you should have control over what kind of information you provide to us and how we use this information.

Please take the time to review our privacy pledge and understand what we do and don't do with data that we collect from you.

Personal and Demographic Data Collected by Away.com

Away.com asks for your name, email address, regular address, zip code, and country when you register. During or after registration, Away.com may ask for other personal interests (including favorite activity and destination), address, birth date, occupation, and income range. Away.com might collect this information through personal interest forms, surveys, or contests. We also ask whether you want to receive emails from us or a catalog from AdventurousTraveler.com, a subsidiary of Away.com.

We also ask whether you are willing to receive special offers from partners. You will have the opportunity to opt-out of the release of information. See the section on "Sharing of Data with Partners and Other Third Parties" for further detail.

If you express interest in booking a trip by either calling us or by filling out a form on our site, we will ask when you plan to travel, where you want to travel, what you want to do while traveling, how many people you want to travel with, where your trip will originate, and whether you require airfare. We will also ask for a daytime phone number in case you want to be called by one of our travel specialists.

Away.com uses this information to provide you with personalized travel services and to direct you to offers from us or selected partners that would appeal to you. You can still use the Away.com site without providing personal information, but you will not be able to take advantage of many of our personalized services.

If you have already registered, you can update your name, email address, zip code, and regular address by clicking here. If you have difficulty reaching these pages, send an email to help@away.com.

If you purchase a product or service from Away.com, you will be asked to provide an address, phone number, and a credit card number. Unless collected elsewhere, Away.com collects this information only to complete the purchase transaction. This does not apply to purchases made on sites linked to by Away.com (see below).

Away.com offers books, maps, and other products through its subsidiary AdventurousTraveler.com. AdventurousTraveler.com has its own privacy policy in regards to purchase transactions made on its site.

Sharing Of Data With Partners And Other Third Parties

Away.com does provide personal information to selected partners who we believe have offerings that would be valuable to you. If you do not want this information disclosed, please send an email toprivacy@away.com.

If you registered with Away.com prior to March 15, 2001, we will assume that you have opted-out of receiving information from Away.com's selected partners, unless they are offered in a message sent by Away.com (for example, in an Away.com newsletter which you have opted to receive).

If you are currently receiving the AdventurousTraveler.com catalog and do not wish your mailing address shared with partners, please call AdventurousTraveler directly at 1-800-282-3963 to withhold your information from our partners.

Away.com has a Trip Finder service and a call center that enables you to book trips run by tour operators not affiliated with Away.com. When you book your travel tour through Away.com, we share the information you have provided with the tour supplier and any other involved third party to ensure successful fulfillment of your travel plans. We are not responsible for tour operators' use of any information provided to them.

If you came to our site from selected partners, we are contractually required to provide your personal information to the partner site. Thus, the opt-out process described above does not apply to these disclosures. Please consult the privacy policy of the partner site to see how the other company will use your information. The list of selected partners is:

  • Discovery.com (Discovery.com's privacy policy)

    • If you provide any personal information on HistoricTraveler.com (which is a site operated by Away.com) or initiate a purchase transaction on a page on the Away.com site marked with the HistoricTraveler logo, we are contractually required to provide all personal information supplied to Primedia, Inc.

    Away.com will disclose personal information when required to by law enforcement or other appropriate governmental authorities, or if the personal information is pertinent in a legal proceeding or court action.

    Away.com will provide aggregate, anonymous information (e.g. "55% of our members enjoy hiking") to advertisers and third parties. Such aggregate data cannot be linked to any one person.

    Merchandise/Co-branded Sites

    Away.com has links to the websites of other companies to allow you to purchase merchandise. These sites may look similar to Away.com, but are run by separate companies with whom we have partnered. You can tell if you are at a partner site if "Away.com" no longer appears in your browser address bar, if the word "frames" appears in the address bar (and the left-hand navigation menu no longer appears), or if the words "Powered by" or "Brought to you by" the name of partner appear anywhere on the page (including the bottom).

    Away.com receives a commission for any purchases you make on partner sites. To help calculate these commissions, Away.com sends a tracking number to the partners. We do not provide personal information to our merchandise partners. Our partners will let us know what you purchased on their sites.

    Each partner site has its own privacy policy on gathering information from you. You may wish to check this policy before giving out personal information. Away.com does not control how a partner uses information gathered on its site.

    As noted above, Away.com contains links to AdventurousTraveler.com, a subsidiary of Away.com, to let you purchase books, maps, and other merchandise. You can reach the privacy policy of AdventurousTraveler.com here.

    Cookies and I.P. Addresses

    As part of offering you a valuable service, Away.com uses cookies to store and sometimes track information about you. A cookie is a small amount of data that is sent to your browser from a web server and stored on your computer's hard drive. A cookie is set when you browse our site. You can set your browser to refuse cookies, but your user experience at Away.com will be significantly limited if you do so.

    We use cookies to:
    1. Enable you to obtain access to our member-only pages without having to retype in your login name and password;
    2. Allow us to offer personalized services to you;
    3. Calculate the number of people who view our site (or a certain page of our site) to allow us to provide better service in the future.
    All people who browse our site receive cookies for the purpose of tracking the number of people who visit any one page. Unless you register, we cannot identify you other than through the tracking number stored in the cookie.

    Away.com also collects IP addresses of those browsing our sites as a complementary way of tracking site usage. We do not track any individual person's activities using IP addresses. Instead, we use this information solely to determine the number of times browsers view a page of our site.

    Advertising Services

    Away.com uses DoubleClick, an advertising network, to provide ads to our site. Away.com does not provide any personal information about our members or people using our site to DoubleClick. Viewing ads will cause a cookie to be set in your browser. DoubleClick uses these cookies to develop a profile on your Web site usage. This will allow DoubleClick to provide the ads that are most suited to your interests. No personal information such as name or email address is tracked in the DoubleClick cookies. DoubleClick does track the types of sites you visit and can associate this information with an ID number set in the cookie.

    DoubleClick has a privacy policy on its site. You can prevent DoubleClick from setting a cookie on your computer by clicking here.

    Email

    Away.com will not send you any email if you do not wish to receive any. Click here to deselect any of our newsletters to which you are subscribed. You will need to be logged in or type in your password to access this page. If you are having difficulty reaching our subscriptions page, you can also email help@away.com to unsubscribe from our newsletters. Periodically Away.com introduces new email products or improves existing ones. In order to introduce you to these products, we will periodically (approximately 4 times per year) examine your subscriptions and subscribe you to those we believe are likely to interest you. You may, of course, unsubscribe from any of these products at any time. If you never want to receive any email from us, please write a letter stating so to:

    Privacy Coordinator
    Away.com
    702 H Street, NW
    Suite 200
    Washington, DC 20001

    Please include your email address in your letter. We cannot guarantee that will be able to completely remove you from our email list unless we receive a physical letter from you. We use an email system that can individually track who opens an email (if you receive the email in HTML format) and who clicks on any link contained in an email. We collect this information so that

    1. We can calculate how many people were interested in the topic of an email or in a particular link of an email;
    2. Provide personalized services that are best suited to your interests
    If you do not wish this information to be collected about you, you should unsubscribe from our emails.

    Public Forums

    Away.com makes message boards available to its members. Please remember that any information that is disclosed in these areas becomes public information and you should exercise caution when deciding to disclose your personal information.

    Security

    Away.com keeps all personal information in a secure server that is only accessible to designated Away.com employees.

    As a further security precaution, Away.com asks you to provide a password when you register on our site. You then have the option of storing that password on a cookie set on your computer. This way, you need not type in the password when you again access the Away.com site.

    If the computer you are using is not for your sole use, you should click the "sign off" button located at the top of every page when you have finished accessing the site. This action prevents other people from accessing your information. When you want to access member-only areas of our site at another time, you will need to sign in and type in your password. You will have the option of having your password e-mailed to you if you have forgotten what it is.

    Supplementing Information

    Away.com supplements the information that you provide with information that is received from third parties. We do not further share this information with others.

    Changes in Privacy Pledge

    As the nature of our business changes, Away.com may need to change its privacy pledge. If the pledge is changed, this page will be updated. You will not be provided with any other notice of a change in the privacy pledge. Please check this page to see if there have been any changes.

    If you have any questions or suggestions about this privacy pledge, please contact privacy@away.com. Alternatively, you can mail Away.com at:

    Privacy Coordinator
    Away.com
    702 H Street, NW
    Suite 200
    Washington, DC 20001

    Please only address questions about the privacy pledge to the above addresses. If wish to remove yourself from our email list, please write to the mailing address only. If you are concerned about a specific page, please mention it in the communication. If you are having difficulties changing your preferences, please send an email to help@away.com.