Privacy Policy
Last updated: this page is a working draft grounded in how this site and booking system actually collect and handle data — it has not been reviewed by an attorney. Have counsel review it before relying on it as final, particularly the Cookies & Tracking section below if you run ads or serve visitors outside the US.
1. What This Covers
This policy covers columbuscarriage.com and our reservation request system. It does not cover third-party sites we link to (like PayPal or Venmo), which have their own privacy policies.
2. Information You Give Us
When you submit a reservation request, we ask for: your name, email, phone number, pickup and drop-off details, flight information (if applicable), passenger and luggage counts, and any notes you add. We use these details to evaluate and quote your ride, and to send you and our scheduler the confirmation and coordination emails a booking requires.
Your trip details — pickup/drop-off address, flight number, passenger/luggage counts, and notes — are emailed to our scheduler and are not stored in our reservation database. If a confirmation or coordination email is lost, that trip detail is genuinely gone and would need to be re-sent, not just delayed — this is a deliberate choice to minimize how much of your information sits in a database.
What we do store, tied to your reservation: your name, email, phone number, requested pickup date/time, trip direction, reservation status, and (once quoted) the price and a payment reference. If you check the box to receive text updates, we also store that you consented and when.
When you contact us through the contact form, that message is sent to us via a third-party form service (Formspree) and is not stored in our reservation database either.
3. Information Collected Automatically
Submitting a reservation request also involves a bot-protection check (Cloudflare Turnstile) and basic abuse-prevention limits tied to your IP address. We store a hashed, non-reversible version of your IP for this purpose, not your IP address itself.
4. Cookies & Tracking
We use, or intend to use, the following third-party analytics and advertising tools on this site:
- Google Analytics — to understand how visitors use the site (pages viewed, general location, device/browser type, referring site).
- Microsoft/Bing Advertising (UET tag) — to measure the effectiveness of ads and, where enabled, for remarketing.
These services may set cookies or use similar technology in your browser and may collect your IP address, device and browser information, and pages you visit on this site. We don’t control how Google or Microsoft use that data beyond the reports they provide us — see Google’s Privacy Policy and Microsoft’s Privacy Statement for how each of them handles it, and their own opt-out tools (for example, the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on and Microsoft’s advertising opt-out).
This site does not currently show a cookie-consent banner. If you’re outside the US, or if this site’s audience broadens beyond its current local service area, this section and that choice should be revisited with counsel.
5. Third-Party Service Providers
We use these services to run the site and reservation system. Each only receives the information it needs to do its job:
| Service | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Postmark | Sends reservation and payment-related emails |
| Twilio | Sends text message updates (not active yet) |
| Cloudflare Turnstile | Bot/abuse protection on the request form |
| PayPal / Venmo | Payment — we never see or store your card information |
| Formspree | Delivers general contact-form messages |
| Google Analytics, Microsoft/Bing Advertising | Site analytics and advertising, see above |
6. How Long We Keep Information
Reservation records are kept for a limited period after a ride is completed, canceled, or otherwise closed out, after which the record is reduced to an anonymized summary (trip date, route, and price only — no name, contact information, or other personal detail) for basic record-keeping. Trip details that were never stored in the first place (see Section 2) aren’t part of this, since they don’t exist in our database to begin with.
7. Data Security
Access to reservation data is restricted to authorized scheduling staff and requires authentication. We use industry-standard measures (encrypted connections, database access controls) to protect the information we store, though no system can be guaranteed completely secure.
8. Your Choices
You can ask us what information we have tied to your reservation, or ask us to delete contact information we still hold, by emailing us (below). Because most trip detail is never stored to begin with, most requests are already limited to your name, email, phone, and reservation record.
9. Children’s Privacy
This service is not directed to, and we do not knowingly collect information from, children under 13.
10. Changes to This Policy
We may update this policy from time to time. The version posted here at the time of your reservation request governs that request.
11. Contact
Questions about this policy, or to make a request about your information: columbuscarriage@gmail.com.