Privacy Policy

What this policy covers

This policy covers this website, lascascadasthefalls.com, and the enquiries you send us through it.

It does not cover the booking system. When you book a room you are handed over to SimpleBooking, a separate company that runs the reservation and takes the payment on its own website. Anything you type there is governed by their privacy policy, not ours. The same is true of the tour operators we introduce you to and of any social network you reach us through.

What we collect

There are only two ways this website learns anything about you: you type it into a form or our live chat, or your browser reveals it by asking for a page.

When you fill in one of our forms, we receive:

• Your name and email address, so we can reply.
• Your phone number, if you choose to give one.
• The details of your enquiry: the dates you are considering, how many people are coming, and whatever you write in the message box. Our wedding form also asks about your event date, the kind of celebration and your guest count.
• A one-way scrambled version of your network address, used only to stop the same source flooding the form. We do not keep the address itself.

What we do not collect

This website has no guest accounts, so it never asks you to create a password.

It also takes no payment. There is no card field anywhere on this site, and we never ask you to send card details by email or WhatsApp. If you are ever asked for a card number by something claiming to be us on this website, it is not us.

Why we collect it

To answer you, and to arrange the stay or the event you asked about.

Beyond that, we use what you send us only to:

• Reply to your enquiry and follow it up, by email, phone or WhatsApp.
• Prepare for your arrival and pass on what our team needs to look after you.
• Keep a record of the enquiry so we can pick the conversation back up if you write again.
• Understand which pages people find useful, so we can improve the site.
• Meet our obligations under Costa Rican law.

We do not sell your information

We do not sell, rent or trade your details, and nothing you type into our forms is ever passed to an advertiser. This is a family hotel, not a data business.

If you allow advertising in your cookie choices, Google learns that your browser visited this site, so that our own offers can be shown to it on other sites. That is the only advertising use, and you can turn it off at any time.

We will only send you marketing if you have asked us to. If we ever do, every message will carry a way to stop it.

Our newsletter

If you sign up in the newsletter box, we keep your email address, the language you signed up in, the page you were on, the exact sentence you agreed to beside the box and the name of your browser, plus the same scrambled form of your network address our other forms keep, to stop abuse. We then send an email asking you to confirm. Until you press the button in it you are not on the list, and nothing else is sent.

What we send is new stories from our blog and the occasional offer from the hotel. Every newsletter carries a way to unsubscribe, and you can also ask us to take you off at any time.

An address nobody confirms is deleted after 30 days. A confirmed address stays until you ask us to delete it; if you unsubscribe, we keep a note that you did, so that we never write to you again by mistake. It is kept in the same walled-off section of our database as enquiries. We send the newsletter ourselves; if we ever use an outside mailing service to send it, we will name it in this policy first.

Where your enquiry is stored

Enquiries are stored in our own database, in a section of it that is walled off from the rest of the business, so the website can add an enquiry and can read nothing else.

Our staff read your enquiry in order to answer it. The email we send ourselves about it goes to our reservations mailbox, which runs on Google Workspace.

We hold no card numbers, so there are none to lose.

Analytics, cookies and session recording

This is the part most privacy policies bury, so it is set out plainly.

Our own pages set no cookies to identify you. Two measurement tools and one advertising tool can, and one of them records how you use the page. None of them sets a cookie until you have accepted it.

Google Analytics is the one exception to waiting. Its code loads on every visit with every permission switched off, so before you choose, and if you decline, Google receives only cookieless pings about the pages you open and how you use them, with no identifier that could recognise you again. Like any request on the web, those pings carry your network address and browser. Google uses them to estimate the visits it cannot see. Microsoft Clarity does not load at all, and nothing is shared for advertising, without your yes.

All three run on the public site, each only as far as your answer allows:

• Google Analytics 4 counts visits and tells us which pages people read, roughly where in the world they are, and whether they arrived from a search, a link or an advertisement. It sets cookies in your browser to recognise a returning device. It does not tell us your name.
• Microsoft Clarity records a replay of your session: the movement of your pointer, your scrolling, your taps and the pages you move between. It also builds heatmaps showing where people click. We use it to find the places where the site is confusing or broken, not to read what you write to us. Text typed into a form is masked in the recording, so the message you send us is not part of it.
• Google Ads, only if you allow advertising, lets us show our own offers on other sites to people who have visited. Google learns that your browser visited; it does not learn your name or anything you type into our forms.

Turning the measurement off

You are asked on your first visit: Accept all, Decline all, or a choice of analytics and advertising separately, with neither box ticked for you. Your answer is kept in your own browser and, when you go on to book, travels with you to SimpleBooking so its booking pages respect it too. The Cookies control in the footer of every page reopens the question, and changing your mind removes the cookies those tools had set on this website. Anything they keep on their own sites is theirs, and your browser settings can clear it.

You can stop all of them without leaving the site. Blocking third-party scripts or cookies in your browser settings, using private browsing, or running a tracker blocker will all prevent them loading, and nothing on this website stops working when they are blocked. That choice is enforced by your own browser, so it does not depend on us honouring it.

Google also publishes a browser add-on that opts you out of Google Analytics on every site you visit.

If you have already been measured and want that data taken out of these tools, write to us and we will put the request to the vendor.

What your own browser keeps

A few small conveniences are stored on your device and never sent to us: the language you prefer (your browser's own setting until you pick one), which room filter you last used, any tours you have added to your plan, and whether you have started our live chat, so that the chat can follow you to the next page. Clearing your browser storage removes them along with your cookie answer, so that question is asked again, and the chat waits for your tap again.

Other services involved in running this site

Serving a web page always reveals your network address and browser to whoever serves it. These are the companies that see a request when you load a page here.

• Cloudflare sits in front of our server, delivering pages and filtering malicious traffic. It sees the address of every request.
• Cloudflare Turnstile is the check on our forms that confirms you are a person and not a script. It runs on pages with a form, and the newsletter box at the foot of every page loads it only when you start to use the box.
• Chatway runs our live chat. Nothing from it loads until you tap the chat button in the corner of the page: tapping it is how you ask for the chat, so it does not wait for your cookie choices. From then on Chatway sees your network address and rough location, keeps a session of its own in your browser, including a small cookie, and loads by itself on every page you open afterwards, on this visit and later ones, so a conversation can carry on. Its window uses a typeface served by Google. What you write in the chat is kept by Chatway and read there by our concierge team. Whenever the chat is not available, outside its hours or if your browser blocks it, the button offers WhatsApp and email instead.
• OpenStreetMap serves the map tiles on our location and contact pages.
• Google Workspace carries the email we send you and the copy we send ourselves.
• Supabase hosts the database our enquiries are stored in.
• SimpleBooking runs the reservation system, on its own website, once you choose to book.

How long we keep it

We keep enquiries for as long as they are useful: to answer you, to prepare for a stay, and to have a record of what was agreed.

We will not pretend to a schedule we do not run. There is no automatic deletion timer on enquiry records today. What there is instead is a promise: ask us to delete yours and we will, and you do not have to give a reason.

Your rights over your information

Costa Rica protects personal data under Ley 8968, and visitors from the European Union and the United Kingdom have rights under the GDPR. In both cases the practical position is the same and we apply it to everyone who writes to us, wherever you live.

You can ask us to:

• Tell you what we hold about you.
• Correct anything that is wrong.
• Delete it.
• Stop using it to contact you.
• Send you a copy of what you gave us.

Children

This website is meant for adults arranging travel. We do not knowingly collect information from children. Families are very welcome at the hotel, and the booking is made by the adult travelling with them.

Changes to this policy

When this policy changes we update the date at the top of this page. If a change matters to you, for example if we started using a new tool that records something, we will say so here rather than quietly editing a sentence.

Asking us about your information

Write to [email protected] or use our contact form, and tell us what you would like us to do. A message on WhatsApp at +506 8964-3562 reaches us too.

You do not need to use any particular wording, and you do not have to explain why.