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 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 we do not hand them to advertisers. This is a family hotel, not a data business.

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.

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 do set cookies, and one of them records how you use the page. Neither one loads until you have accepted it.

Both run on the public site:

• 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.

Turning the measurement off

You are asked before either tool loads. The banner appears on your first visit, your answer is kept in your own browser and nowhere else, and the Cookies control in the footer of every page reopens it so you can change your mind.

You can stop both tools 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

Two small conveniences are stored on your device and never sent to us: which room filter you last used, and any tours you have added to your plan. Clearing your browser storage removes both, and nothing else is affected.

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 only on pages with a form.
• 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.