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This Privacy Policy is effective as of September 12, 2013.
Below you will find the updated Privacy Policy for Hotwire (www.hotwire.com).
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 the following policy to learn about our privacy practices. By visiting this website, you are accepting the practices described herein.
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. This includes
information that can identify you ("personal information"),
including your first and last name, telephone number, postal and email addresses, fax number, 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 some information about you is required in order
for you to register as a member;
book travel; complete a traveler profile; participate in a survey, contest, or sweepstakes; ask us a question;
or initiate other transactions on our site.
Travel Companion Information
When you make a reservation for someone else through this website, we will request personal information and
travel preferences about that individual.
You should 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 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.
Automatic Information
We automatically collect some 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. Our goals in collecting this automatic information include helping customize your user experience
and inhibiting fraud. For more information,
please see Cookies and other technologies.
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 travel bookings you conduct on our site. We use other information about you for the following general purposes: to provide you with the products and services you request; to provide you with travel 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 and 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.
We often receive testimonials and comments from customers who have had positive booking and/or travel experiences on our website. We occasionally publish such content, using first name plus last initial, only, for attribution.
E-mail 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 apparent
travel-related interests. For example, if you search for a flight to New York on our website and have saved your
itinerary or otherwise not yet booked your travel, we may send you an email message reminding you about your
saved travel itinerary or about a special airfare to New York. Similarly, if you receive an email from us about
New York travel and demonstrate an interest in New York hotels by affirmatively clicking on a link about New
York hotels in the email, you may receive an email about New York hotel offers. We believe these email messages
will provide you with useful information about travel-related special offers available through our site 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 Your choices with respect to the collection and use of your information below.
With whom we share your information
This website may share your information with the following entities:
Suppliers such as hotel, airline, car rental, and activity providers, who fulfill your travel reservations. Throughout this site, all services provided by a third-party supplier are described as such. We do not place limitations on our suppliers' use or disclosure of your personal information. Therefore, we encourage you to review the privacy policies of any travel supplier whose products you purchase through this site. 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.
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.
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 have not placed limitations on the referring websites' use of your personal information and 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 parent company and corporate affiliates, such as Expedia.com, CarRentals.com and Hotels.com, as well as international corporate affiliates such as Hotels.uk.com. This sharing enables us to provide you with information about products and services, both travel-related and other, which 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.
We also may share your information:
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 your information
Hotwire registered users can access and update their contact information by visiting the Hotwire My Account page. Hotwire email subscribers can access and update their subscription choices through Subscription Management links found in the footer of any Hotwire email. You can 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. However, you can open a new account at any time. Please also note that we may retain certain information associated with your account, including for analytical purposes as well as for recordkeeping integrity.
Your choices with respect to collection and use of your information
Cookies and other technologies
Cookies are small data text files and can be stored on your computer's hard drive (if your Web browser permits). This website use cookies for the following general purposes:
The Help portion of the toolbar on most browsers will tell you how to prevent your browser from accepting new cookies, how to have the browser notify you when you receive a new cookie, or how to disable cookies altogether. Please note that if you refuse to accept cookies, you may not be able to access many of the travel tools offered on our site.
In addition to the above cookies, we use Local Shared Objects, also referred to as "flash cookies," on our website. These are used to enhance your user experience, for example, by storing your user preferences and settings, such as your volume/mute settings, and in connection with animated content on our website. Local Shared Objects are similar to browser cookies, but can store data more complex than simple text. By themselves, they cannot do anything to or with the data on your computer. Like other cookies, they can only access personally identifiable information that you have provided on this site, and cannot be accessed by other websites. To find out more about flash cookies or how to disable them, please click here: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/526/52697ee8.html.
This site may also use Web beacons (also known as clear gifs, pixel tags or Web bugs), which are tiny graphics with a unique identifier, similar in function to cookies, that are placed in the code of a Web page. We use Web beacons to monitor the traffic patterns of users from one page within our site to another, to deliver or communicate with cookies, to understand whether you have come to this site from an online advertisement displayed on a third-party website, and to improve site performance. We also may allow our service providers to use Web beacons to help us understand which emails have been opened by recipients and to track the visitor traffic and actions on this site. This helps us measure the effectiveness of our content and other offerings.
If you have any questions about our use of cookies or other technologies, please email us using our customer service and feedback form.
Using the Hotwire.com mobile phone and tablet Apps (the “Mobile Apps”)
When you use a Hotwire.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:
You always have the ability to control certain information a Mobile App sends to us. You can switch off location data collection at any time through your phone settings menu. Alternatively, you can remove the Mobile App from your mobile device entirely and access our services through our website.
Display of tailored advertising/Your choices
Data collected by this website to serve you with relevant advertising
Hotwire is committed to providing you with relevant content and information. To do this, we may collect, through
cookies and other technologies
information about your travel-related searches, such as whether you are looking for airline flights or hotels,
and use this information to serve you with ads,
on our website or elsewhere online, that match your apparent interests. So, for example, if you search for a
flight to Florida on our site, you may see an ad
for a Florida travel package on our site or on another website you visit.
Please note that we do not combine the information we collect about your travel-related searches on this website with personal information (such as email address) to serve you with ads across other websites. We also do not share your personal information with third parties so they can serve you with advertisements. You can choose not to receive tailored online advertising on other websites, based on your travel-related searches on this website, by clicking here. Note that if you choose not to receive tailored ads, you will see online advertisements, but they will be more general and less relevant to you.
Data collected by business partners and ad networks to serve you with relevant advertising.
The advertisements you see on this website are served by us or by our service providers. But we also allow third
parties to collect information about your
online activities through cookies and other technologies. These third parties include (1)
business partners, who collect
information when you view or interact with one of their advertisements on our site, and (2) advertising
networks, who collect information about your
interests when you view or interact with one of the advertisements they place on many different websites on the
Internet. The information gathered by
these third parties is used to make predictions about your characteristics, interests or preferences and to
display advertisements on our site and
across the Internet tailored to your apparent interests. We do not permit these third parties to collect
personal information about you on our site,
nor do we share with them any personal information about you.
Please note that we do not have access to or control over cookies and other technologies. These third parties may use to collect information about your interests, and the information practices of these third parties are not covered by this Privacy Policy. These companies may offer you a way to opt out of ad targeting based on their cookies. You may find more information by clicking on the company names above and following the links to the websites of each company. 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 or here.
Data collected by companies that operate cookie-based exchanges to serve you with relevant
advertising.
Like other companies operating online, Expedia.com participates in cookie-based exchanges where anonymous
information is collected about your browsing
behavior through cookies and other technologies and segmented into different topics of
interest (such as travel).
These topics of interest are then shared with third parties, including advertisers and ad networks, so they can
tailor advertisements to your apparent
interests. We do not share personal information (such as your email address) with these companies and we do not
permit these companies to collect any
such information about you on our site. Please click here to learn more about
cookie-based
exchanges, including how to access information about the topics of interest associated with cookies on your
computer and how to decline participation
in these programs.
How we protect your information
We want you to feel confident about using this website and our Apps to make hotel and travel arrangements, and we are committed to protecting the information we collect. While no website 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 only may 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 does not offer services directed to children. Should a child whom we know to be under 13 send personal information to us, 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 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 or using our Apps 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.
Secure Flight Privacy Notice
Privacy notice (found in Section 1560.103 of the Secure Flight Final Rule): The Transportation Security Administration of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security requires us to collect information from you for purposes of watch list screening, under the authority of 49 U.S.C. section 114, and the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004. Providing this information is voluntary; however, if it is not provided, you may be subject to additional screening or denied transport or authorization to enter a sterile area. TSA may share information you provide with law enforcement or intelligence agencies or others under its published system of records notice. For more on TSA Privacy policies, or to view the system of records notice and the privacy impact assessment, please see TSA's website at www.tsa.gov.
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 this Privacy Policy (or your travel planning or purchases), please contact us at:
Our customer care associates are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If you wish to email us, we respond to most customer emails within two hours or less. Depending on the nature of your inquiry and the time of day, our response may take a bit longer.
Phone Toll-Free - within the U.S. and Canada
1-866-HOTWIRE (1-866-468-9473)
Phone - outside of the U.S. and Canada
1-417-520-1680 (regular toll charges apply)
Hotwire Customer Care
655 Montgomery Street, Suite 600
San Francisco, CA 94111
U.S.A
