What we collect

In detail

What the site does not do

• There are no user accounts, and no way to create one.
• There is no third-party analytics, advertising or tracking script on any page. The only script the site loads is its own, from its own domain, and none of it is involved in the measurement described below.
• There is no advertising network, no data broker and no audience segment. Nothing recorded here leaves this server.
• Nothing we record follows you to another site, and nothing another site records follows you here.
• We never ask for a passport number, a date of birth, a payment card or traveller details. We could not use them: we do not take bookings.

First-party visitor analytics

We keep our own record of which pages are read on this site. It stays on our own server, and no analytics company, product or script is involved at any point. It is not anonymous, and this section says plainly what is in it.

What is stored. For each page you open we keep the address of the page, its title, the time, which visit it belonged to, and the referrer if there was one. The referrer is the site your browser reports having come from, which is how we know a reader arrived from a search engine rather than from a bookmark; we keep only the site it names, not the whole address, and a link from one of our own pages is not treated as a referrer at all. Alongside that we keep your IP address, and the browser and operating system your browser reports.

How pages are joined into a visit. Two cookies. fc_vid holds a random identifier for your browser and lasts a year. fc_visit holds a random identifier for one sitting and expires thirty minutes after your last page, so a gap longer than that begins a new visit. Both are set by this site only, both are marked HttpOnly so no script can read them, and neither is sent to anyone else or readable by anyone else. There is nothing in either value: they are random numbers, generated here, with no name, no email address and nothing derived from you encoded in them.

Pseudonymous, not anonymous. The identifier says nothing about who you are, and we have no way to turn one into a name. But the record does hold your IP address, and it does link every page of a visit together, so calling it anonymous would be untrue. Pseudonymous is the accurate word and it is the one we use.

What we do with it. Only we can read it, and we read it to see which guides people actually use and which routes through the site work. It is not shared, sold, exported or sent anywhere.

How long it is kept. Page records, IP addresses and browser details are deleted after 90 days, and anything left over is deleted with them.

What is not counted. Requests for images, stylesheets, scripts, fonts, robots.txt and sitemap.xml. Pages that returned an error. The site’s own admin. And obvious crawlers, which are recognised before any cookie is issued, so a search engine never receives one.

No JavaScript is involved in any of this, so blocking scripts does not change it. What does change it is refusing or clearing the two cookies: without them each page you read is a new visitor with no history, and the visit is a single page.

Find My Cruise

Your choices are carried in the page address so the shortlist can be reproduced and shared. FrenchCruises does not save those finder selections as a profile or an analytics record. Nothing in the five questions is personal: a river, a length aboard, how you want to spend time ashore, how much you want included, and up to three interests.

What we count instead. We count that somebody opened the finder, and that somebody reached a shortlist. We do not record which answers produced it. Your choices are stripped out of the address before anything is kept, they are not written to our error logs, and they are not attached to anything sent when you follow a commercial link.

Writing to us

If you write to us, we keep what you send (your name, your email address, what it is about and your message) so that we can reply and so that a correction has a record. We use it for nothing else, and it goes to no one else. Ask us to delete it and we will.

There is no message form on this site. Email is the way to reach us, and the address is under “your rights” below.

Measuring clicks on commercial links

Some links on this site are affiliate links, and when one is followed we record that it was followed. The recording is first-party: it goes to this site’s own server, from this site’s own script, and no third party is involved at any point.

We keep which link it was, where on which page it sat, the partner’s own tracking codes, the page you were on, and the time. We keep no IP address, no browser details and no device fingerprint.

We do keep the two visitor identifiers described above, when your browser is carrying them, so that a click can be seen in the visit it happened in. They are read from the cookies your browser already sent us, and the page you are reading never has them to give away. If you have no cookies, the click is still counted and simply belongs to nobody.

None of this sits between you and the link. The address in the page is the merchant’s own, your browser goes straight there, and the count is sent separately and afterwards. If your browser blocks it, if you have JavaScript switched off, or if our server is down, the link works exactly the same and we simply do not get the count.

We use the counts to see which guidance readers act on, and to check a partner’s figures against our own. They are not shared, sold or sent anywhere. We know that a link was followed; we do not know whether anything was booked, and nothing on this site could tell us.

Server logs

Our hosting provider keeps the standard web-server access logs every website has, and those include IP addresses. They are the host’s own records, kept for security and troubleshooting under their retention policy. Our own error logs record faults and the fact that a message arrived; they do not record IP addresses. Where we limit how often one connection can write to us, we keep a scrambled form of the address that cannot be turned back into it.

Cookies

Three, all of them set by this site and readable only by this site. Every one is marked HttpOnly, so no script can read it, and SameSite Lax, so it is not sent when another site links into ours in a way that would let them observe it.

• fc_vid, one year. The pseudonymous identifier that recognises your browser between visits.
• fc_visit, thirty minutes from your last page. What joins consecutive pages into one visit.
• fc_session, set only where a page needs a security token. It holds no personal data, it is not used to follow you, and it expires when you close the browser or after two hours.

There is no advertising cookie, no third-party cookie and no cookie set for anyone else. Nothing here is used to follow you to another website, because nothing here is readable by another website.

Clearing the first two leaves you unrecognised: the next page you read starts a new visitor with no history. Nothing on the site behaves differently either way.

Leaving the site

When you follow a link to an operator or a booking partner, you are on their site under their privacy policy, and what they collect is their business and their responsibility. Read it there before you book.

An affiliate link normally carries a code the merchant uses to recognise where you came from, and the merchant may set a cookie of their own when you arrive. That happens on their site, under their policy, not ours. We publish the whole address of every commercial link in the page, so you can see it before you follow it.

Your rights

If you are in the UK or the EU, data-protection law gives you the right to ask what we hold about you, to have it corrected, to have it deleted, and to complain to your supervisory authority. Write to editor@frenchcruises.com and we will act on it.

Two practical notes on the visitor record. We cannot look you up by name or by email address, because neither is in it. If you send us the value of your fc_vid cookie, which your browser will show you in its own settings, we can find that record and delete it. Clearing your cookies achieves the same thing from your side: what is left describes a browser nobody is using any more, and it is deleted after 90 days.

Children

This site is written for adults planning travel. It is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect anything from them.

Changes

When this policy changes, the review date at the top of the page changes with it.