Privacy Policy
1.0 PRIVACY POLICY
This Privacy Policy discusses what information is collected on the Aruba.com website (the “Site”) regarding users, how it is collected, how it is used, how you can access your information and modify it, and other matters related to your information.
This Privacy Policy is part of each of the Terms of Use and User Agreement (“Agreement”) between you (“User” or, as appropriate, “you”) and each of the Aruba Tourism Authority (“ATA”) and the Aruba Hotel and Tourism Association (“AHATA”). Collectively, AHATA and ATA are referred at different times as “we” and“Aruba.com”. “Personal Information” (as defined in the Agreement) includes all personally identifiable information described in this Privacy Policy.
Social Security Numbers
We will not and do not collect your Social Security Number on this Site. Do not provide your Social Security Number on this Site or to any party that says it is from this Site.
1.2 Your California Privacy Rights
The following only applies to California residents.
We may from time to time share your personally identifiable information with our subsidiaries, affiliates, sponsors, partners, advertisers or other third parties for their direct marketing purposes.
If you do not want us to share your personally identifiable information with such third parties for their direct marketing purposes, please let us know by email at email@aruba.com or by mail at Aruba Tourism Authority L.G. Smith Blvd 172, P.O. Box 1019, Subject Line: Aruba.com Unsubscribe. Your opt-out request will be processed within 30 days of the date on which we receive it.
For more information on how your personally identifiable information is collected and used, please read the remainder of our Privacy Policy.
1.3 Children Under 14
This Site is not intended for nor directed to persons under the age of 14. We do not knowingly collect personally identifiable information from anyone under 14 years of age, except for the limited circumstances described below. In the event a person under the age of 14 submits a question to us on this Site and identifies his or her age, we may use the person’s email address for the sole purpose of responding to the person’s question on a one-time-only basis. However, we will not knowingly use the person’s email address to re-contact the person and we will delete it from our records once we have responded. If we become aware that we have unknowingly collected personally identifiable information from a person under the age of 14, we will make reasonable efforts to delete such information from our records.
1.4 Information Collection
This Site collects two kinds of information regarding Users: (1) information that personally identifies you (such as your name, e-mail address, and mailing address); and (2) information that does not personally identify you (such as the number of users who log on to this Site on a daily basis). As a general policy, no personally identifiable information is automatically collected from your visit to this Site. However, in certain circumstances, such as when you register for the Site, you may be asked to provide us with some specific information about yourself in order to use certain features on this Site or to take advantage of certain opportunities that we may offer through this Site.
1.5 Registration
To simply view this Site, you are not required to register with the Site. However, your use is restricted to solely viewing limited portions of this Site. To use the full functionality of this Site, including making reservations and posting comments or reviews on the Site, you must first complete the registration form and create a user name and password. Your user name will be visible on all postings that you make on the Site. During registration, you are required to provide contact information (such as name and email address), as well as demographic information. We use this information to contact you about the services on our Site in which your demographic and interest information may suggest that you would find interesting or useful. Further, we also use the information you provide in developing user profiles and in targeting marketing that will reflect your expressed interests. (You may opt out of receiving such direct marketing by email at unsubscribe@aruba.com. Please allow 30 days for implementation.) We also use the personally identifiable information you provide in connection with any reservations, prospective reservations, or reservation-related activity you conduct on the Site. Questions regarding the registration process may be emailed to Aruba.com at registration@aruba.com.
Registration is available to individuals between the ages of 14 and 18 with prior consent from a parent or legal guardian. Registration is not available to persons under 14 years of age.
1.6 Orders
If you purchase a product or service from the booking engine on the Site, we request certain personally identifiable information to process your order. You will need to provide contact information (such as name, email, and shipping address) and financial information (such as credit card number, expiration date). AHATA and/or its members may use this information for billing purposes and to process your orders
1.7 Contests
We may hold contests on our Site from time to time. If you decide to participate, we may request certain personally identifiable information from you. Participation in contests is completely voluntary and you have a choice whether or not to disclose this information; however, not providing such personally identifiable information may not make possible for you to participate. The information you provide may be added to your profile, and we also use the information to notify winners, and enhance our monitoring of the Site. A third party service provider may conduct these contests. The third party service provider’s contract will contain provisions governing the use and protection of any personally identifiable information that is collected.
12.8 Surveys or Focus Groups
From time to time, we may invite you to participate in a survey or a focus group. You are not required to participate, and may decide not to. If you decide to participate in a survey or focus group, you may be asked to provide certain demographic information (such as your gender, date of birth and zip code). We may use the information that you submit, including your responses to the survey questionnaires, for the purpose(s) identified to you prior to your participation in the survey. In some cases, we may publish the results of the survey, but only as aggregate information. As we may be conducting certain surveys with our advertisers, sponsors or other third parties, we may also share the results of such surveys with such third parties, but in no event will the shared information identify you.
1.9 Send to-Friend
If you choose to use our referral service to tell a friend about our Site, we will ask you for your friend’s name and email address. We will automatically send your friend emails about our Site. Your friend will be able to opt out of receiving additional emails, and instructions in the email will provide the steps that your friend should take to opt out of receiving further communications from the Site. Aruba.com will store your friend’s email address indefinitely, but will honor your friend’s request to stop receiving email from the Site. Further, your friend may contact us at unsubscribe@aruba.com to request that we remove this information from our database.
1.10 Additional Information Sources
We also may collect information at other points on our Site, including the Newsletter Sign-up page, and feedback forms. All information that you provide is optional from these areas, and you do not have to sign up if you do not want to receive the newsletter or provide feedback.
2. Information Uses
This section discusses more specific uses of the information collected on the Site.
2.1 Communications from the Site
2.1.1 Special Offers and Updates
We will occasionally send you information on products, services, special deals, and promotions. You can opt out of receiving these emails from us on your Profile page.
2.1.2 Newsletters
Upon registering on our Site, we will use your name and email address to send our newsletter to you. You can opt out of receiving these newsletters from us on your Profile page or via email: unsubscriber@Aruba.com.
2.1.3 Service-Related Announcements
We will send you strictly service-related announcements on rare occasions when it is necessary to do so. For instance, if our service is temporarily suspended for maintenance, we might send you an email. Generally, you may not opt-out of these communications, which are not promotional in nature. If you do not wish to receive them, you have the option to deactivate your account.
2.1.4 Reservation-Related Communications
We will send you information and otherwise communicate with you concerning reservations made on the Site, prospective reservations, modifications to reservations, cancellations of reservations, and any other reservation-related activity, including promotional and cross-selling opportunities.
2.2 Welcoming and Customer Service
We will send you a welcoming email to verify your user name and password upon registration, based on the information that you provide to us. When you call or write to customer service, we collect contact information (name, email or telephone number) as necessary to assist you. For example, if you call for assistance regarding a purchase, we may request your contact and billing information.
2.3 Profile
We store all of the information that we collect through cookies, log files, clear gifs, and/or third party sources to create a “profile” of your preferences. We tie your personally identifiable information and your purchasing history to information in the profile, in order to provide tailored promotions and marketing offers and to improve the content of the Site for you.
2.4 Supplementation of Information
In order to provide certain services to you, we may on occasion supplement the personal information you submitted to us with information from third party sources. For example, we may use an external service to verify your address and other information, in order to confirm that your user profile is accurate. In addition, we may purchase marketing data from third parties and add it to our existing user database, to better target our advertising and to provide pertinent offers in which we think you would be interested. To enrich our user profiles of individual customers, we tie this information to the personally identifiable information they have provided to us.
3. Information Sharing and Disclosure
3.1 Aggregate Information (non-personally identifiable)
We share aggregated demographic information about our user base with our partners and advertisers. Aggregated information is information about more than one individual, where the identity of the individual is not known, and cannot be inferred from the information. Sharing this information permits our advertisers to know whether our Site will permit the advertisers to target their goods and services to a specific demographic (for example, to know whether there are any unmarried, over-40 year old scuba divers in our user base). In such circumstances, however, we do not link aggregate user data with personally identifiable information of a specific User. You may elect not to have your information shared as aforesaid through our opt-out mechanism located at: http://www.adsrvr.org/.
3.2 Personally identifiable information
We may share your personally identifiable information in the following ways:
Agents. We may use an outside shipping company to fulfill orders, and a credit card or other payment processing company to bill you for goods and services. These companies do not retain, share, store or use personally identifiable information for any other purposes, and are contractually bound to implement appropriate security measures to protect such personally identifiable information and to use the personal information only to perform the services for which they are hired.
3.3 Google Analytics
We use Google Analytics and have recently implemented Google Analytics Demographics and Interest Reporting. However, data collected as a result of our use of Google Analytics is only used internally to enhance our users’ experience using this site and for our own internal marketing purposes. Such data is shared with our partners and advertisers only as aggregate information, as specified in Section 3.1 above. Also, please note that by using Ads Settings you may be able to opt-out of Google Analytics.
4. Legal Disclaimer
We reserve the right to disclose personally identifiable information without your consent and without notice to you as required by law and when we believe that disclosure is necessary to protect our rights and/or to comply with a judicial proceeding, court order, or legal process served on our Site. The legal process may require us to disclose or allow access to personal information such as your account, billing, payment and postings. We may also use or disclose personally identifiable information about you without your consent (a) to protect our other customers, employees, or property, (b) in emergency situations, (c) to enforce our rights in court or elsewhere, or directly with you, for violations of service terms, conditions or policies and/or (d) as otherwise required by law, for example, as part of a regulatory proceeding.
5. Choice/Opt-out
You will be able to opt out of receiving communications from the Site, except for the Welcome/Confirmation email that is sent when you register for the Site. If you do not opt-out from receiving communications about our Site, we will continue sending them to you.
You may change your preferences for receiving communications from us at the Profile page. Further, we will provide you the opportunity to ‘opt-out’ of having your personally identifiable information used for certain purposes, when we ask for this information.
5.1 Retention and storage
We will retain your personally identifiable information in databases in accordance with our document management and retention policy and applicable laws. This period may extend beyond the end of your relationship with us, but it will be only as long as it is necessary for us to have sufficient information to respond to any issues that may arise later. We may also need to retain certain information to prevent fraudulent activity; to protect ourselves against liability, permit us to pursue available remedies or limit any damages that we may sustain; or if we believe in good faith that a law, regulation, rule or guideline requires it.
5.2 Log Files
We gather certain information automatically and store it in log files. This information includes internet protocol (IP) addresses, browser type, internet service provider (ISP), referring/exit pages, operating system, date/time stamp, and clickstream data. We use this information, which does not identify individual users, to analyze trends, to administer the Site, to track users’ movements around the Site and to gather demographic information about our user base as a whole. We link automatically-collected data to personally identifiable information for purposes of tracking Site usage and to allow us to tailor the Site to your preferences, to enhance Site offerings, to increase ease of navigation, and for session timeout.
5.3 Cookies
A Cookie is a small text file that our computer sends to your computer, and that your computer sends back to us each time you make a request from our Site. A cookie contains a unique identification number that identifies the visitor's browser, but not necessarily the visitor. We use cookies on this Site. We also link the information we store in cookies to personally identifiable information you may submit while on our Site. Most Internet browsers automatically accept cookies. You can instruct your browser, by editing its options, to stop accepting cookies or prompt you before accepting a cookie from the Sites you visit.
We use session ID cookies and persistent cookies. A session ID cookie expires when you close your browser. A persistent cookie remains on your hard drive for an extended period of time. You can remove persistent cookies by following directions provided in your Internet browser’s “Help” file.
We use cookies to keep track of login names and passwords, to keep track of click-stream data, to provide tailored content, to enhance navigation, and to offer a personalized experience. Persistent cookies also enable us to track and target the interests of our users to enhance the experience on our Site. We also capture information regarding the next site that you may visit after you leave our Site.
If you decide not to accept our cookies, you will be able to access those parts of our Site that are available to the general public, but you will not be able to access many of the products and services offered at our Site.
5.4 Links to Other Sites
This privacy statement applies only to information collected by this Site, and our Site contains links to other websites that are not owned or controlled by Aruba.com. Please be aware that Aruba.com is not responsible for the content or privacy practices of other websites.
When you leave the Site, realize that you should read the privacy statement of the website that you have linked to. Aruba.com is not responsible for third party websites.
5.5 ShareThis
Through this Site, we make available the ShareThis service (www.sharethis.com), which allows the collection of data related to an end user's interaction with the ShareThis applications, including without limitation, data regarding the sharing of content from this Site on a non-personally identifiable basis ("Sharing" or "Sharing Data"). Consequently, as part of our use of the ShareThis service, we: (i) have granted ShareThis a non-exclusive, perpetual, worldwide and irrevocable right and license to collect, use, create derivative works from, and disclose data derived from the Sharing in accordance with ShareThis’ Privacy Policy, which is located at www.sharethis.com/privacy, and to allow our third party data partners to do the same; (ii) collect and share non-personally identifiable user information with third parties for use in online advertising; and (iii) may allow third parties such as ShareThis to monitor our sites for the purpose of reporting Website traffic, statistics, advertisements, “click-throughs” and/or other activities, and such third parties may use cookies, Web beacons, and other monitoring technologies to compile and use anonymous statistics about our users. You may: (a) opt-out of receiving cookies from ShareThis through a link to ShareThis’ opt out page, which can be found at http://sharethis.com/privacy; and (b) opt-out of receiving cookies from third party advertising networks through a link to the Network Advertising Initiatives cookie opt out page, which can be found at http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp.
5.6 Bulletin Boards/Chat Rooms
The Site contains forums, which automatically displays your user name in association with your posting. It also posts your demographic profile that you provide upon registration. If you include personally identifiable information in the body of your posting, you should be aware that that posting will contain the information that you include. Also, if you use the forum on this Site, you should be aware that any personally identifiable information you submit there can be read, collected, or used by other users of these forums, and could be used to send you unsolicited messages. We are not responsible for the personally identifiable information you choose to submit in these forums. Participation in such bulletin boards or chat rooms is subject to the Terms
5.7 Monitoring
Aruba.com may from time to time monitor and review any information transmitted or received through the Site, or through telephone or email communications, for quality assurance and other purposes. We reserve the right to censor, edit, remove, or prohibit the transmission or receipt of any information that Aruba.com deems inappropriate, or in violation of the Agreement. During monitoring, the information may be examined, recorded, or copied.
6. Access to Personally Identifiable Information
If your personally identifiable information changes, or if you no longer desire our service, you may correct, update, or deactivate it by making the change on our member profile page or contacting us at unsubscribe@Aruba.com. For example, you can change at any time your email address, favorites, or friends, or your preferences for receiving or not receiving our e-mails, e-newsletters, or instant messaging customized advertisements.
Please remember that we may not be able to honor your request if we are legally obligated to retain that information, or for other reasons, as described in our Retention and Storage policy.
7. Security
Aruba.com employs appropriate physical, administrative and technical safeguards to help protect the confidentiality and integrity of information collected by this Site and to reduce the risk of loss, misuse, unauthorized access disclosure or modification of such information. We follow generally accepted industry standards to protect the personal information submitted to us, both during transmission and once we receive it. Be advised, however, that no method of transmission over the Internet, or method of electronic storage, is 100% secure. Therefore, while we strive to use commercially acceptable means to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee its absolute security. If you have any questions about security on our Site, you can send email us at registration@aruba.com.
If you choose to contact Aruba.com through the Site, you should be aware that any information transmitted electronically might not be secure. Aruba.com assumes no liability for the loss of any information that you transmit to us electronically. In communicating with you, we may send e-mail as unencrypted plain text because we are aware that most persons cannot readily process encrypted e-mail. This is done for your convenience, but with the security concern that, if misrouted or intercepted, it could be read more easily than encrypted e-mail.
8. Modifications to this Privacy Policy
If we decide to modify or supplement our Privacy Policy, we will post those changes to this privacy statement, the homepage, and other places we deem appropriate so that you are aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it. Privacy Policy changes will apply to the information collected from the date we post the revised Privacy Policy to the Site, as well as to existing information held by us.
We reserve the right to modify this Privacy Policy at any time, so please review it frequently. If we make material changes to this Policy, we will notify you here, by email, or by means of a notice on our home page. If any proposed change is unacceptable to you, you may request that we remove your personally identifiable information from our records, using the Profile page or contacting us at unsubscribe@Aruba.com.
9. Contact Us
If you have any questions or concerns about the privacy practices of this Site, we will attempt to respond to your questions or concerns promptly after we receive them.
E-mail: registration@aruba.com,
Mailing address:
Aruba Tourism Authority
Aruba.com
L.G.Smith Blvd #8
P.O. Box 1019 Oranjestad, Aruba
Version 02. Effective Date: 10-01-2013
