Privacy Policy | Tourism Today

Last updated January 2015

The Commonwealth of the Bahamas ("Commonwealth", "we," "us," "our") respects your privacy and is committed to protecting your personally identifiable information. We have adopted this privacy policy ("Privacy Policy") to explain what information may be collected on this site ("Site") and how such information may be used and/or shared with others. This Privacy Policy applies solely to information collected through this Site and not through any other sources. This Privacy Policy is subject to the Terms of Use posted on this Site. Please return to this Site and review this Privacy Policy from time to time, as it may be amended without notice. Any changes to this Privacy Policy will be effective immediately upon the posting of the revised Privacy Policy on this Site. Your use of this Site constitutes your agreement to this Privacy Policy.

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 tourism@bahamas.com or by mail at The Bahamas Ministry of Tourism, P.O. Box N-3701, Nassau, Bahamas. 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.

Children Under 13

This Site is not directed to children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personally identifiable information from anyone under 13 years of age, except for the limited circumstances described below. In the event a child under the age of 13 submits a question to us on this Site and identifies his or her age, we may use the child’s e-mail address for the sole purpose of responding to the child’s question on a one-time-only basis. However, we will not use the child’s e-mail address to recontact the child 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 child under the age of 13, we will make reasonable efforts to delete such information from our records.

Your Information and How We Use It

This Site collects two kinds of information: (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, 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. For example:

Newsletters: If you wish to receive our online newsletter, you will be asked to provide your e-mail address. This information will be used to subscribe you to the newsletter you requested.

Promotions, Sweepstakes, and Contests: This Site may, from time to time, offer special promotions, sweepstakes and/or contests. If you choose to participate, you will be required to provide your name, address, e-mail address, and/or date of birth, as well as other information about you that is relevant to the specific promotion, sweepstakes or contest. Such information will be used to select the winners, to notify you if you win one of the sweepstakes and/or contests, and otherwise in connection with the administration of the promotion, sweepstakes or contest. We also reserve the right to share this information with any of the promotion, sweepstakes or contest sponsors or partners and use the information for any other purpose disclosed to you in the applicable terms and conditions.

Message Boards / Chat Rooms: You will be required to register with us in order to participate in our message and bulletin boards and chat rooms. The personally identifiable information that we require during registration may include your name, e-mail address, and other information about you. This information will be used to protect the security and integrity of this Site. It may also be used to provide you with the information or materials that you requested on the registration page. Please be advised that if you voluntarily disclose personally identifiable information on our message or bulletin boards or chat rooms, such information can also be collected and used by others and could result in unsolicited messages from other people.

Please note that any information you submit on this Site will be used (i) to carry out your requests and respond to your inquiries, (ii) in accordance with the terms set forth herein, and (iii) as otherwise disclosed at the point where such information is collected or in any additional terms and conditions applicable to the particular feature of this Site. Please also note that in order to carry out your requests and respond to your inquiries, we may share your personally identifiable information with third parties that perform functions on our behalf (or on behalf of our partners), such as companies or individuals that deliver merchandise, participate in our promotions, administer our promotions, provide marketing or promotional assistance, analyze data or provide customer service (but such information will be shared only to the extent they need such information to perform their functions). Your personally identifiable information may also be used by us or shared with our subsidiaries, affiliates, sponsors, partners, advertisers or other third parties to provide you with product information and promotional and other offers. You may always direct us (by contacting us at the address listed below) not to share your personally identifiable information with these parties or not to use your personally identifiable information to provide you with such information or offers. Except as provided herein, your personally identifiable information will not be provided to any third parties without prior approval from you.

From time to time, we may collect non-personally identifiable information from you through the standard operation of our servers. Such information can include the type of browser being used, the operating system you are using, the domain name of your Internet service provider, and the number of users that visit a specific page on this Site and the character and duration of such visits. This information may be used to help analyze site traffic and improve our services. We may also aggregate such information to create statistical data and share it with potential advertisers, partners, affiliates and other third parties. At no point, however, will the aggregated information personally identify you.

We reserve the right to disclose any personally identifiable or non-personally identifiable information if we are required to do so by law or if we reasonably believe that such action is necessary in order to: (a) fulfill a government request; (b) conform with the requirements of the law or to comply with legal process served on us; (c) to protect or defend our legal rights or property, this Site, or its users; or (d) in an emergency to protect the health and safety of this Site’s users or the general public.

Surveys

From time to time, we may conduct surveys on this Site. If you decide to participate, you may be asked to provide certain demographic information (such as your sex, 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 results personally identify you.

IP Address

An IP address is a number that is automatically assigned to your computer whenever you are surfing the Web. Web servers, the big computers that "serve up" Web pages, automatically identify your computer by its IP address. We collect IP addresses for purposes of system administration, to report aggregate information to our sponsors and advertisers, and to track the use of this Site. When visitors request pages from this Site, our servers log the visitors’ IP addresses. It is not our practice to link IP addresses to anything personally identifiable, which means that a visitor’s session will be logged, but the visitor remains anonymous to us. However, we reserve the right to use IP addresses to identify a visitor only when we feel it is necessary to enforce compliance with this Site’s policies or to protect our service or customers, this Site, or others.

Cookies

"Cookies" are small text files from a Web site that are stored on your hard drive. These small text files make using a Web site more convenient by saving your passwords and preferences for you. Cookies themselves do not contain any personally identifiable information. We may analyze the information derived from these cookies and match such information with data provided by you or another party. We may provide our analysis and certain non-personally identifiable information to potential partners, advertisers (who may use this information to provide advertisements tailored to your interests) or other third parties, but we will not disclose any personally identifiable information, except as provided in this Privacy Policy. Also, we may allow third parties that serve advertisements on our Site (including our promotion partners) to place and access cookies on your computer, but they will not be able to access our cookies. The use of cookies by such third parties are not subject to our Privacy Policy, but are subject to their own respective privacy policies.

You can have the option of deciding whether or not to accept a cookie by resetting your browser to notify you whenever a cookie is being sent to your hard drive. You may also delete a cookie manually from your hard drive. Please note, however, that some parts of this Site will not function properly or will be considerably slower if you refuse to accept a cookie or choose to disable your cookies settings.

Transfer of Assets

As we continue to develop our business, we may sell or purchase assets. If another entity acquires us or all or substantially all of our assets, personally identifiable information, non-personally identifiable information, and any other information that we have collected about the users of this Site will be transferred to such entity as one of the transferred assets. Also, if any bankruptcy or reorganization proceeding is brought by or against us, all such information may be considered an asset of ours and as such may be sold or transferred to third parties.

Choice

You can choose not to receive any newsletter, e-mail or other communication from us by (i) following the removal instructions in the communication that you receive, or (ii) e-mailing us at: tourism@bahamas.com. If you choose to e-mail us, please be sure to attach a copy of the unwanted communication.

Keeping Your Information Secure

We have reasonable and appropriate security measures in place to protect against the loss, misuse and alteration of the information under our control. Please be advised, however, that while we strive to protect your personally identifiable information and privacy, we cannot guarantee or warrant the security of any information you disclose or transmit to us online and cannot be responsible for the theft, destruction, or inadvertent disclosure of your personally identifiable information.

[Please keep in mind that whenever you give out personal information on a message board or in a chat room, that information can be collected and used by people you do not know. If you choose to voluntarily disclose information on our message boards and in our chat rooms, this Privacy Policy will not cover such disclosure of information. We urge you to use caution when disclosing any personal information on our message boards and in our chat rooms.]

Other Sites

This Site may contain links to other Web sites that we do not control or maintain. We are not responsible for the privacy practices employed by these other Web sites. We encourage you to note when you leave this Site and to read the privacy statements of such other Web sites before submitting any personally identifiable information.

Contact Information

If you have questions or comments about our privacy practices, or if you wish to review or amend any personally identifiable information you have provided, you can contact us at:

The Bahamas Ministry of Tourism
P.O. Box N-3701
Nassau, Bahamas