Privacy Policy

Overview

Totally Budapest ("we", "us") respects your privacy. This page explains what data we collect when you visit totallybudapest.com, how it's used, and how this site earns money.

Affiliate disclosure

Totally Budapest is a member of several affiliate and referral programmes, including Wise, the Amazon Associates programme, Hotels.com (Expedia Group) and Expedia Flights (Expedia Group). Some links on this site — including the "Our Preferred Card When Travelling" and "Shop Essential Travel Items" links, and the flight/hotel search boxes on most pages — are affiliate links. If you sign up, book or make a qualifying purchase through one of these links, we may earn a commission or referral bonus. This costs you nothing extra — in some cases, like the Wise card, it may even get you a perk of your own.

We only link to products and services we'd genuinely recommend regardless of whether they paid us anything — affiliate relationships never determine what we write about Budapest itself. Affiliate links are marked with rel="sponsored" in the page code, which is how we disclose them to search engines as well as to you here.

Analytics & cookies

We use Google Analytics (via Google's gtag.js) to understand how visitors use this site — which pages are popular, how people navigate between guides, and general traffic patterns. This involves cookies and similar technologies that may collect your IP address, device and browser information, and pages visited. This data is processed by Google in line with Google's own privacy policy.

If our best guess is that you're visiting from the EU, EEA or UK, we show a cookie banner and don't set analytics cookies until you actively accept — see "Cookie consent" below for how that detection works and its limits. Visitors from elsewhere are not shown this banner, since it isn't legally required outside that scope, though analytics cookies still apply the same way described above.

Cookie consent (EU / EEA / UK visitors)

Because this is a static site with no server, we can't reliably detect your real location by IP address. Instead, the cookie banner uses your browser's timezone setting as a best-effort signal for whether you're likely browsing from the EU, EEA or UK. This is a reasonable approach for a site like this, but it isn't perfect: if your device's timezone is set to somewhere else — for example while travelling, or using a VPN — you may not be shown the banner even if you're covered by GDPR or UK data protection law, or you may be shown it even if you're not. If you'd like your analytics preference respected regardless of this detection, you can decline cookies manually any time via your browser's privacy settings, or use a browser extension that blocks analytics scripts.

Advertising (Google AdSense)

This site displays advertising through Google AdSense. Google and its advertising partners may use cookies and similar technologies to show ads based on your visits to this and other websites, and to measure how those ads perform. This can include personalised advertising based on your browsing activity.

For visitors we detect as being in the EU, EEA or UK, ad personalisation is switched off by default — the same way analytics is — until you accept the cookie banner described above. Visitors elsewhere may see personalised ads by default, in line with Google's standard AdSense behaviour.

You can opt out of personalised advertising at any time via Google's Ad Settings, or, if you're in the EU, via Your Online Choices. US visitors can also use the Digital Advertising Alliance's opt-out tool.

Booking widgets (Expedia & Hotels.com)

The flight and hotel search boxes on this site are provided directly by Expedia Group and Hotels.com. When you use them, your search is handled by those companies, not by us — please refer to Expedia's and Hotels.com's own privacy policies for how they handle your search data. We only receive a commission if a booking results from your visit; we don't see your personal travel details.

Search

The on-site search feature works entirely in your browser — it does not send your search terms to us or to any third party. No search history is collected or stored.

Data we don't collect

We don't require account creation, and we don't ask for personal information such as your name, address or payment details anywhere on this site. If you email us via the contact page, we'll have your email address and whatever you choose to include in your message — we use that only to reply to you, and don't add it to any marketing list without your explicit consent.

Children's privacy

This site is not directed at children, and we don't knowingly collect personal information from children.

Third-party links

This site links to third-party services (transport operators, museums, booking platforms, our affiliate partners, and similar) for practical convenience. We aren't responsible for the privacy practices of external sites you visit from our links.

Changes to this policy

As the site grows, this policy may be updated to reflect new features, new affiliate partners, or legal requirements. We'll update the date at the top of this page whenever that happens.

Contact

Questions about this policy can be sent to [email protected].

This is a template privacy policy and should be reviewed by a qualified professional before launch to ensure full compliance with GDPR and other applicable regulations for your specific business setup.