Privacy Policy

We collect information in three ways, depending on how you interact with us:

• Information you give us directly — for example, when you chat with Ask Des, submit a trip inquiry, or email or call us. This can include your name, email address, phone number, travel dates, origin city or airport, number of travelers, budget, trip preferences, and anything else you choose to share about the journey you’re planning.
• Information from Instagram — if you comment on one of our Instagram posts to request information (see “Instagram and Meta Interactions” below), Meta provides us the limited information needed to identify and respond to that specific comment.
• Limited technical information — such as your IP address, used briefly and automatically to prevent spam and abuse of our chat and inquiry forms. This is not stored in our database; it exists only in server memory for a short window and then expires.

We use the information we collect to:

• Respond to your questions and plan the trip you’re asking about
• Follow up on an inquiry you’ve started
• Operate and improve Ask Des and our website
• Protect our forms and chat from spam and abuse
• Meet legal and accounting obligations

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it with third parties for their own marketing purposes.

When you submit a trip inquiry through our website, the details you provide — such as your name, email, phone number, where you’re traveling from, when you’d like to travel, how many travelers, your budget, and any notes about the occasion or your preferences — are securely stored so we can plan your trip and follow up with you.

If you reach us through a campaign link (for example, an Instagram or Facebook ad), we also record which campaign brought you to the page, so we understand which marketing efforts are working. This attribution is read once from the page’s web address when you land on it and is not tracked through cookies.

When you submit an inquiry, we also send ourselves an internal notification (see “Service Providers” below) so a member of our team knows to follow up — this is for our own operations and is never visible to anyone outside Journey by Des.

Ask Des is our AI-powered trip-planning assistant. When you chat with Ask Des, your messages and Ask Des’s replies are stored so the conversation can continue where you left off, and so a member of our team can review it if you’re ready to plan a trip with us.

To generate its replies, Ask Des sends your conversation to Anthropic, the company that provides the underlying AI model, strictly to produce a response to you. If, over the course of a conversation, you share trip-planning details — such as your name, email, destination, dates, or preferences — those details are saved to your inquiry record the same way they would be if you’d filled out a form, so we can help plan your trip.

If a conversation reaches a point where it’s ready for a real person to take over, our system sends an internal notification to our team so we can follow up with you personally.

We maintain an Instagram account (@journeybydes) and use Meta’s official Instagram API to interact with the people who engage with our posts. If you comment on or message one of our posts, Meta may provide us information necessary to identify and respond to that interaction — this is part of how Instagram and Meta’s platform works, and it is governed by Meta’s own privacy policy in addition to this one.

On our Cancún campaign post on Instagram, commenting the word “CANCUN” (including common accented variants like “Cancún”) triggers an automated private reply containing a link to our Cancún travel guide. This is handled entirely through Meta’s official Instagram messaging API.

To make sure each comment receives exactly one reply — never zero, never a duplicate — we keep a minimal internal record for each qualifying comment, consisting only of:

• Which post the comment was on
• An identifier for the comment itself
• Whether the reply was sent, and Meta’s confirmation ID for it if so
• A short technical note if the reply failed to send
• When these events happened

We do not store the text of your comment, your Instagram username, or any Meta access credentials as part of this automation.

Journey by Des does not use cookies. On our Italy campaign landing page only, we use the Meta Pixel to understand how well that campaign is performing — but only after you explicitly accept optional analytics on the consent banner shown on our site. If you decline, or haven’t made a choice yet, the Pixel never loads. When it is active, it records only that a visit or an inquiry happened — no name, email, phone number, or other personal details are attached to that event.

Your consent choice is remembered only in your own browser (not on our servers), and you can change it at any time using the “Privacy Choices” link in our site footer.

We work with a small number of trusted service providers to run our website and respond to you:

• Supabase — securely stores our conversation, inquiry, and delivery records
• Vercel — hosts our website
• Anthropic — provides the AI model behind Ask Des
• Meta / Instagram — powers our Instagram interactions and, where you consent, our campaign analytics
• Telegram — delivers internal alerts to our own team when a new inquiry arrives; this is an internal tool, not a channel we use to contact you

Each of these providers only receives the information necessary to perform its function for us, and each has its own privacy and security practices.

We keep your information for as long as reasonably necessary to respond to your inquiry, plan your trip, and meet our legitimate business and legal needs. If you’d like us to delete your information sooner, contact us and we’ll do so unless we have a legitimate reason to retain it (for example, a completed booking we’re required to keep records of).

Your information is stored with Supabase using industry-standard security practices, and access to it is restricted to Journey by Des systems and team members who need it to do their job. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, but we work to protect your information using reasonable technical and organizational safeguards.

You can:

• Accept or decline optional analytics at any time via “Privacy Choices” in our footer
• Ask us what personal information we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it, by contacting us using the details below
• Stop an Ask Des conversation or an Instagram interaction at any time

We’ll respond to any request as promptly as we reasonably can.

Journey by Des is intended for adults planning travel and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child has provided us information, please contact us and we will remove it.

Our website and Ask Des’s recommendations may reference or link to third-party sites — for example, destinations, partners, or resources we mention while planning your trip. We aren’t responsible for the privacy practices of those sites, so we encourage you to review their own privacy policies.

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time as our website and services evolve. We’ll update the effective date above when we do, and if a change is significant, we’ll make that clear on this page.