Privacy Policy

Last updated 5 September 2026.

The short version

• You can read every guide on this site without giving us anything or creating an account.
• The only information you hand over deliberately is what you type into the contact form, and it is used to reply to you.
• Google Analytics counts visits so we know which guides people actually use.
• This site is funded by display advertising supplied by Google AdSense, which uses cookies to choose the ads you see. You can switch off personalised advertising with the links below.
• Nothing here is sold to anybody.

The rest of this page sets that out properly. It covers www.patagoniatourism.org and applies to everyone who visits, wherever you are.

Who is responsible

Patagonia Tourism Guide is an independently published travel reference and is the data controller for the information described here. Get in touch about anything on this page through the contact form.

What we collect

Information you give us

The contact form asks for your name, your email address and your message. Sending it is entirely your choice. We use what you send to answer you, and to make the correction if you are reporting one. Enquiries are not added to any mailing list, because there is no mailing list.

Information collected automatically

Like every website, ours sits on a server that keeps access logs. These record your IP address, the browser and device you are using, the page you asked for, the page that referred you and the time of the request. They exist so the site can be kept working and secure, and they are not used to try to identify you.

Comments

Comments are closed across this site, so no commenter names, email addresses, IP addresses or avatars are collected or stored at all.

Cookies

Cookies are small files a site asks your browser to keep. The ones in play here fall into three groups:

• Strictly necessary — set by WordPress and the caching layer so pages load and the contact form’s spam protection works. The site cannot function without these.
• Analytics — set by Google Analytics to tell a returning visitor from a new one and to count sessions.
• Advertising — set by Google and by other advertising vendors to select ads, cap how often you see the same one, and measure whether an ad worked.

Every browser lets you block or delete cookies, usually under Settings then Privacy. Blocking the necessary ones may break parts of the site; blocking the others will not.

Analytics

We use Google Analytics 4 to understand which guides get read, which are ignored, and roughly where readers are in the world — the sort of thing that decides what gets written next. It reports on groups, not individuals: we can see that a few thousand people read the Torres del Paine guide last month, not who any of them were. IP addresses are truncated by Google before the data reaches us. Google’s own privacy policy covers what it does with the data, and Google publishes a browser add-on that opts you out of Analytics on every site at once.

Advertising

This site is funded by display advertising, which is what keeps the guides free and free of sponsorship. Our advertising is supplied by Google AdSense.

Current status: advertising is not yet being served on this site. This section describes how it will operate, and is published in advance so you know what to expect.

• Google, as a third-party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on this site.
• Google’s use of the DoubleClick DART cookie enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visit to this site and to other sites on the internet.
• Third-party vendors and ad networks other than Google may also serve advertising here, and may likewise use their own cookies, web beacons and similar technologies to select ads and measure them.
• What that involves is your IP address and the approximate location derived from it, your device and browser, the pages you looked at here, and your interactions with the ads. It does not involve your name or your email address — advertising vendors are not given those, and we could not give them yours unless you had sent them to us yourself.

Turning off personalised advertising

• Google’s My Ad Center controls how Google personalises ads for you across everything it serves.
• The US industry opt-out is at optout.aboutads.info.
• The European equivalent is at youronlinechoices.eu.
• Google maintains a list of the vendors that may appear on partner sites in its advertising policies.

Opting out stops the ads being tailored to you. It does not stop the ads — you will still see the same number, they will simply be chosen without reference to your browsing, and will generally be less relevant.

Consent for visitors in Europe

When advertising goes live, visitors in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland will be shown a consent message from a Google-certified consent management platform before any advertising or analytics cookie that requires consent is set. You will be able to accept, refuse, or set your choices by category, and to change your mind afterwards from the same control. Refusing does not restrict any of the content on this site.

Who your information is shared with

Nobody buys data from us and nobody is sold any. Information reaches third parties only in these ways: our web host, which stores the site and its logs; Google, in its capacity as our analytics and advertising provider; and the mail service that carries a contact-form message to the inbox. Beyond that, we would disclose information only where the law required it or where it was genuinely necessary to protect the site’s rights or someone’s safety.

Google operates globally, so data handled by Analytics and AdSense may be processed outside your own country, including in the United States. Google relies on the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses and its certification under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework for those transfers.

Legal bases, if you are in the EU or UK

• Consent — for analytics and advertising cookies, given or refused through the consent message described above.
• Legitimate interests — for server logs and basic security, where the interest is keeping a website running and defended, and the impact on you is minimal.
• Consent, again — for the contact form, since you choose to send it. Withdraw it by asking us to delete the correspondence.

Your rights

If the GDPR applies to you, you have the right to ask what we hold about you, to have it corrected, to have it deleted, to restrict or object to how it is used, to receive it in a portable form, and to withdraw consent at any time. You may also complain to your national data protection authority.

If you are a California resident, the CCPA gives you the right to know what personal information is collected and for what purpose, to have it deleted, to opt out of its sale or sharing, and not to be treated worse for exercising any of that. We do not sell personal information as the CCPA defines the term. Where advertising cookies amount to “sharing” for cross-context behavioural advertising, the opt-out links above are the mechanism.

Ask through the contact form. We do not hold accounts or profiles, so in most cases the only thing we can hold about an individual is an email exchange.

How long things are kept

Contact-form correspondence is kept while it is useful — typically until the enquiry is dealt with and any correction has been made — and is then deleted. Server logs rotate on the host’s own schedule, normally within a few months. Analytics data is retained under Google’s settings for the property, which are set to the shortest period Google offers. Advertising cookies expire on their own timetable, which is set by Google and the vendors concerned, not by us.

Children

This site is written for adults planning travel and is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect information from them. If you believe a child has sent us something through the contact form, tell us and it will be deleted.

Links to other sites

The guides link out constantly — to CONAF and Argentina’s national parks, to ferry and bus operators, to park concessionaires, to municipal tourism offices. That is deliberate, because those are the authoritative sources. But once you follow a link you are on somebody else’s site under somebody else’s privacy policy, and we have no control over what they collect. The same goes for the sites an advertisement takes you to.

Security

The site is served over HTTPS, so traffic between your browser and it is encrypted, and it is kept patched. No site can promise perfect security, which is a reason not to send anything sensitive through a contact form on any website, ours included.

Changes to this policy

This page will be updated when what the site does changes — notably when advertising begins to be served. The date at the top always reflects the current version, and material changes will be described here rather than slipped in.