Privacy policy

Last updated: 16 August 2026

StayByCity is a travel guide. It has no accounts, no logins and no newsletter, and it never asks you for anything in order to read it. This page sets out the little data that does pass through the site, and who else is involved in it.

What we collect

Nothing you have to give us. Reading a guide requires no name, no email address and no sign-up. We hold no database of readers.

If you write to us through the contact form, you send us whatever you put in it — typically a name, an email address and a message. That message is delivered to our inbox by email. It is not stored in a database on this site. We keep it for as long as it takes to answer you and to keep a record of the correspondence, and we use it for nothing else: no marketing, no list, no sharing.

Analytics

We use Google Analytics to understand how the site is used in aggregate — which guides are read, roughly where readers come from, whether something is broken. It tells us about pages, not about people, and we do not try to identify anyone from it. Where the law requires your permission first, it does not load at all until you have given it, and you can take it back at any time from Cookie preferences at the foot of every page — our cookie policy sets out exactly when each applies. Google's own handling of that data is covered by Google's privacy policy.

Affiliate links

Some links on this site are affiliate links, provided through Travelpayouts. If you book something after following one, we may be paid a commission, at no extra cost to you. To attribute that booking, Travelpayouts sets cookies and receives information about the visit. Its scripts also load parts of Google's advertising network — Google Ad Manager — and Google Fonts, which means Google receives the technical details of the request too. It is all governed by the same choice as analytics: where permission is required none of it runs until you have given it. See Travelpayouts' privacy policy, and our own cookie policy for what is set and how to control it.

Hosting and spam protection

The site is served by Cloudflare, which necessarily processes the technical details of each request — IP address, browser, the page asked for — in order to deliver it and to keep the site up. The contact form is protected by Cloudflare Turnstile, which performs a similar check to tell people from bots. See Cloudflare's privacy policy.

Cloudflare also counts visits for us through its Web Analytics service. Unlike the analytics above, it sets no cookies and stores no identifiers — it counts pages, not people, and cannot follow anyone between sites — which is why it runs for every reader rather than waiting for permission: there is no personal choice for a consent to govern. The counting happens inside the same company that already delivers each page.

Your rights

You can ask us what we hold about you, ask for it to be corrected or deleted, or object to our using it. In practice the honest answer is usually that we hold nothing beyond an email you sent us, and that we will delete it on request. Write through the contact form and we will answer.

The third parties above hold their own data under their own policies, linked in each section; requests about that data are best made to them directly, and we will help where we can.

Changes

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. We do not keep an archive of previous versions.