Overview
On Global Choice Travel Services website, our mobile applications and our mobile websites (“the Platforms”) we and third parties can store and access cookies, IP addresses and use other tracking technology methods to enable Platform functionality, collect aggregated data about website usage, improve your online experience and manage and tailor our advertising and service communications with you. There are means of disabling cookies as set out below if you choose to do so, however this may affect your use of our Platforms. See below for more information about what cookies are, the tracking technology we use, and how we use them. You can also update and change your cookie preferences here.
What is a cookie?
A cookie is a small file that is placed and stored on your browser or device by a platform. Cookies allow a website owner to distinguish the activities carried out from your device from other users of that website. Each website can send its own cookie to your browser or device if your browser's preferences allow it, but (to protect your privacy) your browser only permits a website to access the cookies it has already sent to you, not the cookies sent to you by other websites.
How do we use cookies and our types of cookies?
Our Platforms use different types of cookies. Cookies can be categories based on several attributes: Session cookies exist just for your session on our Platform and persistent cookies exist for a period of time after your visit. First party cookies are cookies set by our Platforms and third party cookies are set by third party platforms. We utilise both session and persistent cookies, and first and third party cookies.
We also use cookies for different purposes. For example, we use some cookies to provide a seamless service when you use our loyalty schemes, or complete a booking, or where you don't complete a booking (so we can inform you of this and provide assistance) and other cookies to improve our use of advertising to make it relevant to you. To assist you, we've provided a more detailed explanation of the types of cookies we use below categorised by the purpose of the cookies.
- Essential Cookies ‑ These cookies are essential for the operation of our Platforms. They include, for example, cookies that enable you to log into secure areas of our websites, progress or complete a booking or make use of other online services we provide. They also include cookies that help us understand how users use our website, allowing us to improve the overall experience without being able to identify or target you or any other user individually. If you disable these cookies then you may not be able to use our Platforms fully or at all.
- Functional cookies ‑ These cookies are used to recognise you when you return to our Platforms. This enables us to personalise our content for you, greet you by name, provide your Skywards details if you are registered and remember your preferences (for example, your choice of language or region) and to identify to us where you don't complete a booking (so we can inform you of this and provide assistance).
- Marketing cookies ‑ These cookies record your visit to our websites, the pages you have visited and actions you have taken. We will use this information to make our advertising displayed on other platforms (by third party advertising providers) more relevant to you. We may share this information with third parties for this purpose, for example, we may serve you a relevant advertisement based on your browsing history with our Platforms. We also use third party cookies so we can personalise our advertisements to you and to help us analyse our customers' behaviour. Our third party advertising providers set anonymous cookies on other websites that we advertise on. If you receive one of those cookies, we may then use it to identify you as having visited that site if you later visit our Platforms. We then personalise our advertisements to you based on this information.
- Partner Marketing cookies ‑ These cookies are set by third parties (our partners) to track your interests, including information about the products and services you are interested in, or purchase, on our Platforms. This information can be used to make the third parties’ advertising displayed on other platforms more relevant to you and measure the effectiveness of, and optimize, marketing activities that our partners run in cooperation with us. Please note that our partners are also data controllers of the personal information collected and processed via these cookies and they will use this information for their own purposes. These third parties, however, use non‑directly identifiable information (which does not include, for example, your name, address, email address or telephone number). You can find more information about the third parties that currently place marketing related cookies on our Platforms below. We encourage you to read the privacy statements and relevant notices of these third parties.
Other tracking technologies
We use clear image files, pixel tags and other similar technology embedded within emails we send to you and on our Platforms. These files are tiny graphics with a unique identifier, similar in function to cookies. In contrast to cookies, which are stored on your computer’s hard drive, clear images are embedded invisibly on web pages or in emails. We may use clear images (a.k.a. web beacons, web bugs or pixel tags), in connection with the Platforms to, among other things, track the activities of Platform visitors, help us manage content, and compile statistics about usage of the Platforms. We and our third party service providers also use clear images in HTML e‑mails to our customers, to help us track e‑mail response rates, identify when our e‑mails are viewed, and track whether our e‑mails are forwarded.
We use aggregated statistics provided by third party digital platforms about your interaction with us across multiple devices, such as your laptop and mobile, based on your log‑ins into different services offered by these third parties. These statistics help us understand your journey across different devices and personalise the look and feel of our Platforms. These third party digital platforms also allow us to personalise our advertisements to you on your various devices on the basis of your behaviour on one or more of your devices where you have logged into the relevant third parties’ services.
We use other aggregated data provided by third party digital platforms including demographic information (such as age and gender) and your interests (such as travel and shopping) derived from your other website usage, together with our own aggregated data about your interactions with us on our Platforms to understand user behaviour to improve our Platforms, products and services. We do not disaggregate this data to identify your specific demographic or interest information.
Use of Google Analytics
This site uses Google Analytics, a web analytics service provided by Google, Inc. (“Google”). Google Analytics uses cookies, which are text files placed on your computer, to help the website analyse how users use the site. The information generated by the cookie about your use of the website (including your IP address) will be transmitted to and stored by Google on servers in the United States. In case of activation of the IP anonymization, Google will truncate/anonymize the last octet of the IP address for Member States of the European Union as well as for other parties to the Agreement on the European Economic Area. Only in exceptional cases, the full IP address is sent to and shortened by Google servers in the United States. On behalf of the website provider, Google will use this information for the purpose of evaluating your use of the website, compiling reports on website activity for website operators and providing other services relating to website activity and internet usage to the website provider. Google will not associate your IP address with any other data held by Google. You may refuse the use of cookies by selecting the appropriate settings on your browser. However, please note that if you do this, you may not be able to use the full functionality of this website. Furthermore you can prevent Google’s collection and use of data (such as cookies and IP address) by downloading and installing the browser plug‑in available under https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout/ (Opens external link in a new tab). Further information concerning Google’s terms and conditions of use and data privacy can be found at http://www.google.com/analytics/terms/gb.html (Opens external link in a new tab) or at https://www.google.de/intl/en_uk/policies/ (Opens external link in a new tab). Please note that on this website, Google Analytics code is supplemented by “gat._anonymizeIp();” to ensure an anonymized collection of IP addresses (so called IP‑masking).
Useful links
The following website gives information specifically about privacy (such as issues around Internet advertising: YourOnlineChoices.eu (Opens external link in a new tab)) ‑ as referred to above this allows you to set which advertising cookie providers you accept.
Updates
We may amend our Cookie Policy from time to time to keep it up to date with legal requirements and the way we operate our Platforms. If we decide to change our Cookie Policy, we will place any updates on our Platforms, such as this webpage. Please regularly check this webpage and the Cookie Policy of any relevant Platforms for the latest version of our Cookie Policy.
