Privacy policy

We make no automated decisions with legal effect on you. The trip planner does rank tours by the answers you give it, and we keep those answers with your planner session to put the plan together, to improve our suggestions and to prepare an offer for you; what we then offer you is decided by a person. We do not sell personal data. If you accept the analytics and advertising cookies the cookie banner asks about, Google can connect what you do on this site with its own advertising profile of you; until you accept, nothing is loaded from Google's tag servers, and you can refuse or withdraw at any time (section 8).

• Galápagos Daily Tours, the travel agency in Puerto Ayora, Galápagos, Ecuador, that sells your trips: the booking details it needs to book your services with the operators and to look after you before and during your trip, that is your contact details and the passengers' names, dates of birth, nationalities, passport numbers, pickup details and the health notes you gave.
• Galápagos Daily Tours also receives the plan you put together in the trip planner, with the name, email address and phone number you gave, when you ask us to email you the plan or to advise you on it, so it can follow up on your trip.
• The operator performing each service, in Ecuador: the passengers' names, dates of birth, nationalities and passport numbers, the name, email and phone of the person who booked, and the health notes you gave, for that service only.
• Ecuadorian authorities, where the law requires it for the service: the Galápagos National Park (visitor permits), the port captaincy and the coast guard (passenger lists of every boat) and the Galápagos Governing Council (Transit Control Card), through the operator or, when it acts for you, through the travel agency.
• Our service providers, bound by contract to process data only for us: Google (Firebase Authentication for sign-in, Cloud Firestore and Cloud Storage for our databases and files, stored in São Paulo, Brazil; Cloud Run for our servers; Firebase Cloud Messaging for the app's notifications, on iPhones through Apple's push service), Vercel Inc. (hosting of the website, USA), Stripe (payments), Google (Gmail) (transactional email).
• If you write to us on WhatsApp, WhatsApp (Meta) handles those messages under its own privacy policy.
• Our own team in Switzerland, through the ToursTrust operations systems, on a need-to-know basis.
• Courts and authorities when we are legally obliged to disclose.

We never sell personal data. We pass none of the data in section 2 to advertisers; if you accept the analytics and advertising cookies the cookie banner asks about, Google receives what those cookies measure about your visit, under its own privacy policy (section 8).

Our About page shows reviews of Galápagos Daily Tours from Google Maps. Your browser loads the reviewers' profile photos directly from Google's servers, so Google receives your IP address and browser details; Google's privacy policy applies to that. The links to the reviews and to the map open Google Maps.

The services you book take place in Ecuador, which has no adequacy decision from Switzerland or the European Commission. Passing the passengers' details to the travel agency Galápagos Daily Tours, to the operators and to the authorities there is necessary to perform your contract (Swiss FADP Article 17(1)(b); GDPR Article 49(1)(b)); we pass on only what the service requires. Health details go to the operators only because you give them for that purpose, which is your explicit consent (FADP Article 17(1)(a); GDPR Article 49(1)(a)): without an adequacy decision, the protection of data in Ecuador has not been found equivalent to Swiss or EU law. Our providers in the United States process data under the Swiss–US and EU–US Data Privacy Frameworks or the standard contractual clauses recognised by the Swiss and EU authorities. Google keeps our databases and files in its São Paulo region in Brazil, under the same standard contractual clauses.

• Bookings, invoices and payment records: 10 years after the end of the year of the booking (Swiss Code of Obligations, Article 958f).
• Health notes: 90 days after the last service of the booking, then deleted.
• Your trip planner session, if you gave no contact details and made no booking: 90 days after you last worked on the plan, then deleted.
• A plan you gave contact details for, and the enquiry it became: 24 months after the last exchange; if you book, the retention for bookings above applies.
• The consents you give, with the text you agreed to and the moment you did: as long as we keep the data they cover, as proof that you gave them.
• Requests we could not confirm or that you did not accept: 12 months.
• Your account: until you delete it; bookings that must be kept by law are then kept without the account.
• The app's notification centre: the copies of the notifications we sent you, until you delete your account; they are deleted with it.
• Messages on a booking: with the booking, as above; other messages: 24 months after the last exchange.
• Server logs: 30 days.
• Newsletter: until you unsubscribe.

You may ask for access to your data, have it corrected or deleted, restrict or object to its processing, receive the data you gave us in a portable format, and withdraw a consent at any time with effect for the future. Most of this you can do yourself in your account; for everything else write to salesgalapagosdailytours@gmail.com. To withdraw your consent to passing on health details, ask us to delete them: we delete them from the booking and from the operators' copies. We answer within 30 days. You may complain to the Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC) or, if you live in the EU, the EEA or the UK, to the supervisory authority of your country.

Data travels encrypted (TLS) and is stored encrypted at rest with our providers. Access inside ToursTrust is limited to the people who need it for their work, and passport numbers and health notes are shown only where a booking is handled. No system is perfectly secure; if a breach ever affects you, we inform you and the authorities as the law requires.

The site sets the cookies and browser storage it needs to work (your language, whether a planner trip or a cart exists, your sign-in session, and the number of your planner session with the key that goes with it, for 30 days) and one more: when you arrive through a local partner's QR code or link, that partner's code for 30 days, so a booking you make can be credited to them (the code, not you, is what we record with the booking). Analytics and advertising cookies are set only if you accept them in the cookie banner: before that, nothing is loaded from Google's tag servers, and a rejection leaves the site exactly as it is. Your answer is kept in a cookie for six months, so we do not ask again. The cookie policy lists everything and says how to refuse it or change your mind.

Bookings are made by adults. The details of passengers under 18 are entered by the adult who books, who is responsible for them. The trip planner asks for the age of each child travelling, because the minimum ages of the tours and the children's prices depend on it; it asks for ages only, never for a child's name, and the names of young passengers are entered with the booking.

We update this policy when our processing changes and show the date of the last change at the top. For significant changes we tell account holders by email.