Cookie policy

Last updated: 16 August 2026

A cookie is a small file a site asks your browser to keep, so that something can be remembered between pages or between visits. StayByCity uses very few of them, and none that identify you by name.

When they run

With one exception that sets no cookies at all — the visit counter under "Technical" below — nothing below loads before you have been asked or told. If you are reading from the EU, the EEA or the UK — where permission has to come first — none of it runs until you answer: the scripts sit inert in the page, so not even a lookup of the other company's address happens, and refusing costs one click of the same size as accepting. Everywhere else the law asks for information rather than permission, so you get a notice instead and the services start; the same panel is one click away whenever you want to switch them off.

Which of the two you get is worked out from the country your request comes from, by the server that hands you the page. It is not stored and it goes no further. If that check fails for any reason, you are treated as someone who has to be asked.

What is used here

• Analytics. Google Analytics sets cookies to count visits and see which guides are read. They tell us about pages rather than about people.
• Affiliate attribution. Travelpayouts sets cookies so that a booking made after following one of our links can be attributed to this site. This is how the guides are paid for; it costs you nothing.
• Advertising. The Travelpayouts scripts load parts of Google's advertising network as part of how they operate — Google Ad Manager, on domains such as doubleclick.net and googlesyndication.com — along with Google Fonts. We did not add these separately; they arrive with the monetisation scripts. The cookies they set are advertising cookies, they are Google's, and Google uses them under its own policies across the many sites that carry its services. Like everything else on this list, they wait for your answer.
• Technical. Cloudflare, which serves the site and checks the contact form for bots, may set cookies needed to do that. Cloudflare also counts visits for us (Web Analytics): that counter sets no cookies and stores no identifiers, which is why it is the one thing on this page that does not wait for your answer — there is nothing personal for an answer to govern.
• One of ours. Your choice about the above is stored in your browser — in local storage, not in a cookie — with the date, the version of this page it was made against, and whether you were asked or merely told. That last part is there so a notice you were shown is never recorded as a yes you never said. It holds nothing else, and it never leaves your device. If the services listed here change, you are asked again rather than being held to an old answer.

How to control them

On this site, from the Cookie preferences link in the footer: it reopens the same panel at any time, and withdrawing is as easy as giving. Nothing third-party runs again until you say so.

Every browser can also block or delete cookies, and most can do it per site — look for "cookies" or "site data" in its privacy settings. Blocking them will not stop you reading anything here: the guides are plain pages and do not depend on cookies to work.

For analytics specifically, Google publishes an opt-out browser add-on. Browser privacy modes and tracking-protection features also block most of what is described above.

Third parties

The cookies above that are not ours are set by the companies named, under their own policies: Google — which appears here twice, once for the analytics we added and once, through Travelpayouts' scripts, for advertising — Travelpayouts and Cloudflare. What they do with what they collect is set out there, and we do not control it.

Changes

If what we use changes, this page and the date at the top change with it. See also our privacy policy.