Our privacy policy has changed as of May 20, 2008. To view the previous version of our privacy policy, please click here.

Welcome to BudgetTravel.com, the online version of Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel Magazine (the"Service"), a website provided by Newsweek Budget Travel, Inc. ("Budget Travel," "we," or "us") a subsidiary of The Washington Post Company. Portions of the Service are hosted by our affiliated company, Washington Post Newsweek Interactive, and by other companies with which we have service agreements. This privacy policy describes how we treat the information we collect through the Service. If you have any questions about this policy, please click here, and indicate on our feedback form that your question concerns privacy.

Information we collect

Personal Information. We receive and store any information that you choose to enter through the Service. This includes personal information, such as your name, e-mail address, telephone number, address, and other information about you that you may submit through the Service, including through any material that you post to your account page or other content that you provide on the Service. We may require that you provide some personal information in order to register and participate in certain features offered through the Service, including to post content and sign up for newsletters and alerts. In some cases, we may combine this information with personal information we have collected about you from other sources, such as affiliated companies and through our subscription process.

Automatic Information. We may automatically collect some information about your computer when you visit the Service. For example, we may collect your IP address, Web browser software (such as Internet Explorer), and referring web site. We also may collect information about your activity on the Service, such as the activities in which you participate. We may combine this automatically-gathered information with other information, including personal information we have collected about you.

Cookies. When you visit the Service, we may assign your computer a "cookie" (a small, unique identifier text file) to remember who you are. We also may include other information in our cookie files; for example, if you arrived at the Service via a link from third-party site, we may include the URL of the linking page. You may opt out of the cookies delivered by Budget Travel by changing the setting on your browser. Please be aware that this will disable all cookies delivered to your browser, not just the ones delivered by Budget Travel. We may combine the information we collect through cookies with other information, including personal information we have collected about you.

How we use this information

We may use the information we collect about you in certain ways in connection with our business. These uses include:

• Providing you with the products and services you request;
• Managing your account, including processing bills, handling subscriptions, and sending renewal notices;
• Responding to your questions and comments;
• Providing you information about products and services offered by Budget Travel, our affiliates, and selected third parties.
• Soliciting information and feedback from you, including through surveys and questionnaires, and for other editorial purposes;
• Delivering targeted advertisements to users meeting various demographic criteria (e.g., females over 25 years of age);
• Performing business analyses or for other purposes to improve the quality of our business, the Service, and the products and services we offer; and
• As otherwise described to you at the point of collection or pursuant to your consent.

With whom we share this information

We may share the information we collect about you in limited circumstances, including:

• With our authorized service providers that perform certain functions or services on our behalf (such as to host the Service, manage databases, or provide certain components of the Service);
• To affiliates within the Washington Post Company family;
• To third parties that may sponsor or co-sponsor promotions on the Service, although we will provide upfront notice if those third parties will be permitted to use your personal information for purposes other than in connection with the promotion;
• To selected third parties for direct marketing purposes, although you may choose upfront and at no cost that we not share your personal information with these third parties for direct marketing purposes;
• To respond to subpoenas, court orders, or other legal process, in response to a request for cooperation from law enforcement or another government agency, or to establish or exercise our legal rights or defend against legal claims;
• When we believe it is necessary to investigate, prevent, or take action regarding illegal activities, suspected fraud, or as otherwise required by law;
• To enforce our Terms of Use and other agreements, or otherwise protect or defend the rights or property of Budget Travel, its affiliates, or others, or the safety of the public;
• Under confidentiality arrangements, for business analyses (e.g., to match user data with third-party data);
• In connection with a corporate transaction, such as a divestiture, merger, consolidation, or asset sale;
• In aggregated or another non-personally identifiable form to third parties for various business purposes, including to improve the quality of our business, the Service, and the products and services we offer; and
• As otherwise described to you at the point of collection or pursuant to your consent.

How you can access your information

You can access and update the personal information you have provided on our website through our account management system by clicking here.

How we protect your information

We have implemented security procedures to help protect the personal information that you provide to us. However, no method of transmitting or storing electronic data is ever completely secure, and we cannot guarantee that such information will never be accessed, used, or released in a manner that is inconsistent with this policy.

Children's privacy

We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. Should we learn that a child under 13 has provided us with personal information, we will delete that information from our database.

Behavioral advertising and third-party cookies

We use a third-party advertising company to serve ads when you visit our site. This company may use information (not including your name, address, email address or telephone number) about your visits to our and other websites, in combination with non-personally identifiable information about your purchases and interests from other online and offline sources, in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you. In addition, we share web site usage information about visitors to our sites with this company for the purpose of managing and targeting advertisements and for market research analysis on our site and other sites. For these purposes, we and our third-party advertising company may note some of the pages you visit on our site through the use of pixel tags (also called clear gifs). In the course of serving advertisements to this site, our third-party advertiser may place or recognize a unique cookie on your computer. If you would like more information about the information collection practices of this third-party advertising company and to learn about and access your choices about not having this information used by this company, click here. Please note that opting out through the above procedure will affect not only the Service and other sites operated by Budget Travel or our corporate affiliates, but other sites served by our advertising vendor as well. However, it will not affect the cookies used by Budget Travel.

Often our advertisers contract with a third-party service to host their ads. In this case, an ad-serving vendor contacts the advertisers' hosting service for a particular advertisement, and an independent cookie may be used by the third-party service. We do not have a mechanism to allow visitors to opt out of cookies from vendors with whom we do not have a contractual relationship.

A special word about user submissions

Please keep in mind that whenever you voluntarily disclose personal information online in public forums, that information can be collected and used by others. For this reason, we encourage all users to refrain from providing or sharing their personal information in article and blog comment threads, discussion forums, message boards, and other areas in which we allow users to submit content to be made available to the public. For information on our requirements for user content, please see our User Submission Guidelines.

External links

If any part of the Service links you to other websites, those websites do not operate under this Privacy Policy. We recommend that you examine the privacy statements posted on those other sites to understand their procedures for collecting, using, and disclosing personal information.

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 e-mail address you provided to us or by placing a prominent notice on the Service.

How you can contact us

If you have any questions or concerns about this Privacy Policy, you may contact us by completing our feedback form. Please indicate on our feedback form that your question concerns privacy.

This privacy policy is effective as of May 20, 2008.