Privacy Policy

GetAwayVacays ("we," "us") is operated by Utmost Solutions LLC, a Tennessee limited liability company. This policy explains what happens to information on getawayvacays.com. We have tried to describe what this site actually does, including the parts most sites gloss over.

The short version

You can read this site without giving us anything. We do not run analytics or advertising trackers, and we never sell your information. However, this site loads maps, videos, and other content from third parties, and those companies can see your IP address and may set their own cookies. Details are below.

Information you give us

• Contact form. If you use our contact page, we receive your name, email address, subject, message, and optionally your company and phone number. We use it only to reply to you.
• Accounts. If you create an account, we store your email address, the name you give us, and a cryptographically hashed version of your password in our own database (Convex). We handle sign-in ourselves — there is no third-party login provider, and we do not offer social login. We never store your password in a form we can read, and we cannot recover it. Creating an account does not by itself let you publish anything; posting is limited to the site's authors.

Information collected automatically

Our hosting provider records standard technical server logs, which can include your IP address, browser user-agent, and the time and path of your request. We use these only for security and to keep the site running. This site does not ask for your device location.

Cookies and browser storage

• We set no cookies of our own unless you sign in, and we do not use Google Analytics or any similar analytics product. If you do sign in, we set two cookies that keep you signed in. They are not used to track you or to build a profile.
• We use your browser's local storage for small preferences. This stays in your browser.
• Third-party embeds set their own cookies — see below.

Third parties that can see you

When you load pages on this site, your browser connects directly to these companies. They can see your IP address and may collect information under their own policies, which we do not control:

• YouTube (Google) — embedded videos. Google may set cookies and track viewing activity whether or not you press play.
• Google Maps — interactive maps and place information on trip pages.
• Unsplash— stock photographs. Where a post uses an Unsplash photo, the image is loaded directly from Unsplash's servers (their license requires this), so Unsplash can see your IP address when that photo loads. Photographs we took ourselves are served from our own storage and involve no third party.
• Convex — our database, which your browser connects to in order to load site content.
• Map and imagery providers — the map tiles and weather radar on our trip and cruise pages are loaded from their providers.
• Amazon — affiliate product links and widgets. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases.

Services we send data to from our servers

These never see you or your IP address — they only handle our own content, from our servers:

• Anthropic — we use Claude to help write and check our own posts. Worth knowing: when we ask it to describe one of our photos, that photo is sent to Anthropic, so if you appear in a photo we publish, its image may have been. We never send it your personal information.
• Unsplash — when we search for a stock photograph to illustrate a post.
• Weather and tide data providers — forecasts and tide times for cruise ports.

Our site and our own photos are hosted on Amazon Web Services.

Photos we publish

Most photos on this site are taken by us and published deliberately. Please be aware that we publish photo details alongside them, including the place name, date taken, and camera model, and that our photos are stored on public web addresses. Some photos are stock photographs from Unsplash; those are credited to their photographer where they appear. If you appear in one of our photos and would like it removed, please contact us and we will take it down.

How long we keep things

Messages you send us stay in our email for as long as we need them. Account information persists until you ask us to delete it. Technical server logs age out on our provider's standard retention schedules.

Security

This site is served over HTTPS, so information you send is encrypted in transit. No method of transmission or storage is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

Your choices

You can ask what we hold about you, ask us to delete it, or ask us to remove a photo, by emailing support@getawayvacays.com. Depending on where you live, you may have additional rights under laws such as the GDPR or CCPA; contact us and we will honor them. You can also block third-party cookies in your browser, though some features may stop working.

Children

This site is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from them.

Changes

If we change this policy, we will update the date at the top of this page.

Contact

Questions about this policy? Use our contact page or email support@getawayvacays.com.