Privacy Policy

Elseplore is a trip-planning service. From a short quiz about how you like to travel, it suggests European destinations and routes that fit you and builds day-by-day itineraries. It is available as a website and as an app for iPhone and Android. References to "Elseplore", "we", "us", or "our" in this policy refer to the Elseplore service and the people who run it.

Elseplore is run by Sandra Orozco and Pol Ciriquian, who decide together how your personal data is used and are joint controllers of it under the GDPR. They have agreed between them who handles what; you can ask for the essence of that arrangement. Whichever of them you contact, you can exercise your rights against each of them. The single contact point for anything about your data is privacy@elseplore.com, which reaches both.

When you use Elseplore we collect:

• Account data — your email address and name, provided when you sign in (by email, or through Google).
• Travel preferences — your quiz answers, including travel vibes, avoids, pace preference, budget threshold, and planning style.
• Derived profile data — dimension scores (culture, adventure, nature, social, luxury, comfort, gastronomy, wellness) computed from your quiz answers.
• Trip details — what you enter when you plan a trip: departure city, travel dates, budget, and who is travelling (number of adults, and the ages of any children).
• Your trips — the itineraries and routes built for you, the changes you make to them, and the destinations you mark as not for you.
• Shared trips — when you tap Share on a trip, anyone who has the link can view that trip's itinerary (not your name, email, or profile). Trips you have not shared stay private to your account.
• Trip chat messages — what you type when you ask for a change to a trip, and the replies.
• Search history — the destinations you searched for and the results shown to you.
• Error reports — when something breaks, a technical report of the error: the page, the browser or app version, and the code that failed. It doesn't include your name, email, IP address or what you typed.
• Messages you send us — emails to our privacy or support address, and our replies.
• Usage events — the main steps you take in Elseplore: starting and finishing the planning steps and the quiz, seeing results, signing up, building, changing, opening, sharing or downloading a trip, reaching a usage limit, and opening the iPhone or Android app. Each records the time, whether you used the website, iPhone or Android app, and small facts such as the destination or trip type, never what you type. We keep these ourselves; no outside analytics company receives them.

If you start planning before creating an account, your quiz answers and trip details are kept against an anonymous identifier in your browser and attached to your account when you sign up.

We do not collect your phone's location, contacts, or photos, and we do not collect payment details.

• To provide the service you ask for: your account, your traveller profile, matching destinations to it, building, saving and changing your trips (including with the trip chat), and offline copies in the app. The legal basis is our contract with you, and before you sign up, the steps you ask us to take (GDPR article 6(1)(b)). Without your travel preferences we cannot score destinations or build personalised itineraries.
• To build and change trips with AI: part of that service. We ask for your permission before anything is sent to the AI provider for the first time (see below).
• To see how Elseplore is used and keep it working and secure: usage events (for example, where people stop before finishing a trip), usage limits, and error and security logs. The legal basis is our legitimate interest in running and improving the service (article 6(1)(f)). You can object at any time by emailing us.
• To answer you and meet legal duties: replying to your emails and to requests about your data, and keeping records the law requires (articles 6(1)(c) and 6(1)(f)).

Matching destinations to your profile is automated profiling, but it doesn't produce decisions with legal or similarly significant effects on you: it suggests trips, and you choose.

We do not sell your data or share it with partners, and we do not use it for advertising.

Itineraries and the trip chat are produced with an AI model, Claude, provided by Anthropic. To build or change a trip we send Anthropic your travel preferences and profile scores, the trip details listed above, and the messages you type in the trip chat. We do not send your name or email address.

Anthropic processes this on our behalf to return the result. Under its terms for business customers it does not use this data to train its models.

Itineraries are generated automatically and may contain mistakes. Check opening times, prices, and bookings before you rely on them.

These companies handle data for us so the service can run. They act on our instructions and are not allowed to use your data for their own purposes:

• Clerk — sign-in and account management (email address, name).
• Vercel — hosting of the website and app pages.
• Railway — the database where your profile and trips are stored.
• Anthropic — the AI model, as described above.
• Sentry — error reports, stored in its EU data centre.
• Cloudflare — our domain, and forwarding the emails you send to our privacy and support addresses.
• Google — the shared inbox where those emails arrive. If you choose to sign in with Google, Google also confirms your name and email to us, under its own privacy policy.

Some of these companies are based in the United States, so your data may be processed outside the European Economic Area. Where it is, it is protected by the EU–US Data Privacy Framework when the company is certified under it, or otherwise by the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses in our data processing agreement with that company.

Maps and photos on trip pages are loaded from Esri and Wikimedia Commons; like any website you visit, they see your device's IP address when the image loads. Links to booking, flight-search, and maps services take you to those companies' own sites, under their own privacy policies.

• Your account, profiles and trips: until you delete your account.
• Answers given before signing up (if you don't create an account): 30 days.
• Usage events: at most two years.
• Error reports: 90 days at most.
• Emails you send us: as long as needed to answer them, and at most two years.
• Backups: our database provider keeps short-term backups; deleted data disappears from them within 30 days.

If you delete your account, all your personal data is deleted straight away from the live service and from backups within 30 days, including your usage events. Totals that can't identify you (for example, how many trips were built in a month) may be kept to improve the service.

You must be 16 or older to create an account. Elseplore is not aimed at children. If you plan a family trip, you can tell us the ages of the children travelling with you; we use them only to plan that trip.

Under GDPR you have the right to:

• Access — request a copy of all data we hold about you.
• Rectification — correct inaccurate data by retaking the quiz or updating your profile.
• Erasure — delete your account and all associated data from your account settings (Settings, then Delete account), or by emailing us. See how to delete your account.
• Portability — request your profile data in a machine-readable format.
• Object — object to personalisation profiling at any time by deleting your traveller profile.
• Complain — lodge a complaint with a data protection authority, such as the Spanish Agencia Española de Protección de Datos (aepd.es) or the one where you live.

• Sign-in session (Clerk) — keeps you signed in. Necessary.
• Your answers before sign-up (wf_anon) — an anonymous identifier so your quiz answers and trip details aren't lost while you plan. Necessary for the service you're using.
• Your cookie choice (wf_consent) — remembers whether you allowed statistics. Necessary.

If you're not signed in, we ask before linking your visits to that anonymous identifier for our own usage statistics. If you choose "Only necessary", those statistics are counted without any identifier. You can change your choice by clearing the site's cookies. We do not use advertising or third-party tracking cookies. Local storage may be used to remember small display settings.

In the iPhone and Android app, trips you open are also saved on your phone so you can read them without a connection. These copies are removed when you sign out or delete your account.

For any data-related requests, email us at privacy@elseplore.com. We reply within one month.