Personal Information and Privacy Policy
This means information like your name, contact details, travel preferences or special needs/disabilities/dietary requirements that you supply to us or is supplied to us, including any information about other persons on your booking relating to the same. For the purposes of this policy, this is referred to as ("your information").
Your information is collected when you request information from us, contact us (and vice versa) or make a booking with us. You are responsible for ensuring that other members of your party are aware of the content of our Privacy Policy and consent to your acting on their behalf in all your dealings with us.We will update your information whenever we get the opportunity to keep it current, accurate and complete.
You have the right to ask at any time in writing for a copy of the information we hold about you (for which we may charge a fee) and to correct any inaccuracies in your information.
We may disclose your information to our operators in Ecuador (eg, hoteliers, national park agencies, etc.) for the purpose of providing you with our services. Only information necessary for this purpose will be disclosed to them and such information will ONLY be disclosed to the relevant parties.
We do not disclose any of your information to any third parties not immediately related to your holiday, either before, during or after your holiday.
Internet Privacy Policy
We also undertake not to send you 'spam' email either before, during or after your holiday although we will usually send you a 'welcome home' email to thank you for your custom and to give you an opportunity to provide us with feedback.
In the interests of your privacy, www.therealecuador.co.uk and www.therealecuador.com do not store any of your personal information, either in cookie form or in a database.
Your Financial Security
As you may have noticed, we are not a member of ABTA or ATOL. The main reason for us not having joined ABTA is the prohibitive cost. We are a relatively new and small company and the (extremely substantial) cost of joining would have a significant impact on our prices. Since we pride ourselves on offering the best possible value to our customers we wanted to find a way to offer the protection our clients require while still keeping our prices as low as possible.
In order to offer our customers the protection they deserve, and after consultation with the Trading Standards authorities, we are operating a system which works just like being a member of ABTA and which we have been advised meets all our legal responsibities.Until we reach a size where we can join ABTA and still offer our holidays at a fair price we have decided to meet our responsibilities in this area by setting up a trust account with HSBC Bank which works in exactly the same way. When you book a Ecuador holiday from us the money you pay for your holiday actually goes into an independent trust account until you return from your holiday. In this way, we have absolutely no access to your money until after you have returned from your holiday so you can be sure that your money is completely secure.
As far as ATOL protection is concerned, we will shop around for you for your international flights and find the best deal going for your required dates, then give the details to you either with an internet link or a phone number for you to contact. This means that tickets purchased here give you direct ATOL protection and tickets purchased in Ecuador are covered by IATA agreements. In this way you are completely covered under all applicable legislation.
Sorry if this all appears rather complicated - the regulatory system in the UK is one of the most complicated in the world but we are advised that we already meet all our legal requirements and we believe that we can offer you complete protection as a customer. In an ideal world we would just pay for full ABTA and ATOL membership as we realise how important it is for people to feel completely secure about their holiday. Unfortunately at the moment of writing we are not able to do this without passing on the cost of this to our customers and this is something we feel equally strongly about! If you have any questions at all about this or any other aspect of our business, please do not hesitate to get in touch with us.
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