Privacy Policy

You can browse this entire site without telling us who you are. We do not use advertising trackers, we do not sell or rent personal information, and we never have. The only personal information we hold is what you type into one of our forms and send us on purpose.

Cruise Pier is operated by Gold Spike Travel, a travel agency. When this page says we or us, that is who it means. You can reach us any time at hello@cruisepier.com or 213-998-7123.

Every page loads a small script from analytics.jkcoxson.com, which is our own installation of Umami, an analytics tool we run on our own server. It tells us which pages are being read and roughly where in the world readers are, so we know which cruise guides are worth writing more of.

It sets no cookies, it assigns you no advertising identifier, and it cannot follow you to any other website. It does not store your IP address; your address is used in passing to derive a country and a device type and is then discarded. The measurements are counts, and nothing in them points back to a person. Because it is our own server, no analytics company receives this data either.

There are two forms on this site, and both work the same way.

The contact form asks for your name, your email address, your message, and optionally a phone number. The cruise request form you reach from a sailing's price asks for your name, email address and phone number, the cabin type you clicked, and any notes you choose to add about your trip.

A submission is emailed straight to our advisors and is not saved to this website's database. There is no account, no profile, and no stored history of what you have asked about. What we then have is an email in a mailbox, which we keep as long as we are working with you and for a reasonable period afterwards for our business records. Ask us to delete it and we will.

We use it to answer you. If you ask us to price or book a cruise, we will also use it to talk to you about that cruise. We do not add you to a marketing list you did not ask for.

If you decide to go ahead with a booking, we act as your travel agent, and the cruise line needs the details of the people traveling in order to carry them. At that point we pass on what the booking requires (names, contact details, and whatever the line asks for) to that cruise line and, where relevant, to a hotel, airline or insurer involved in the same trip. They handle it under their own privacy policies. We will only ever do this for a trip you have asked us to arrange.

This site sets no cookies on your browser and uses no third-party advertising or tracking technology.

It does keep one technical value in your browser's session storage: a short-lived token the page uses to fetch cruise fares, which prevents automated collection of our pricing data. It holds nothing about you, it is not readable by any other site, and your browser discards it when you close the tab.

Do Not Track. Some browsers can send a "Do Not Track" signal. There is no agreed standard for what a site should do with one, and we do not need to treat it as a special case: we do not track you across websites or over time, for anyone, whether or not the signal is set.

Like any web server, ours records requests, which includes IP addresses, so that we can keep the site up and diagnose faults. We also keep a short-lived record in memory of how much of the fare catalog a given address has requested, which is how we tell a reader from a scraper. It is held for a matter of hours, it is never written to our database, and it is not combined with anything from the forms above or used to build any profile of you.

Nobody buys this data from us, because we do not sell it, and we do not share it for anyone else's advertising. The only companies that touch it are the ones that make the site work: the provider that hosts our server, and the email provider that carries a form submission from the site to our inbox. They act on our instructions.

We would also disclose information if the law genuinely required it of us, or where we had to in order to protect our rights or someone's safety.

Wherever you live, you can ask us what personal information of yours we hold, ask for a copy of it, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. Email hello@cruisepier.com and we will do it. We will not treat you differently for asking, and we will not charge you for it.

Residents of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, Virginia and other states with privacy statutes have these rights by law, along with the right to opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information and of targeted advertising. We do none of those things, so there is nothing to opt out of, but the request rights above are open to everyone, and we honor them the same way regardless of where you live. If we ever turn you down, you may appeal by replying to us, and in some states you may complain to your attorney general.

If you have written to us and would rather we stopped, say so and we will stop contacting you.

This site is meant for adults planning travel. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child has sent us something, tell us and we will delete it.

If what we do changes, this page changes with it and the date at the top moves. There is no version of this site where that date is older than the practice it describes.

Ask us anything