Privacy Policy Last updated: October 2026

Privacy policy

This policy explains what we collect, why we collect it, and how we protect it when you use Crowdtrip.

1. Introduction

Welcome to Crowdtrip (“we”, “us”, “our”). Crowdtrip is a travel planning and coordination platform designed to help individuals and groups organise trips, collaborate on decisions, build itineraries, and book places to stay, with the assistance of AI.

Crowdtrip is operated by Dotvelocity Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (Company No. 09443474). Dotvelocity Ltd is the data controller for the personal data described in this policy. You can reach us at hello@crowdtrip.com.

This policy covers the Crowdtrip website, the web app and the Crowdtrip app for iPhone and Android. We are committed to protecting your privacy and handling your personal data in a transparent and secure manner.

2. Key Principles

  • Your data is never sold to third parties
  • Your trip data belongs to you
  • AI is assistive, not autonomous: Hector only acts when a user asks. Anything sent to the group or hard to undo, such as announcements, polls, invites, date changes, expense splits and deletions, is shown to the user to confirm first. Smaller changes the user asks for, such as saving a place or adding a plan item, are made straight away and reported in the chat.
  • Data is used to improve your trip experience, not for advertising or external profiling
  • Privacy boundaries are respected between group data and personal data
  • We never see your card details. Hotel payments are taken by our booking partner, not by Crowdtrip.

3. Information We Collect

3.1 Account Information

Name, email address, password (stored only as a salted hash, never as plain text), profile photo if you add one, home currency, and nationality if you tell us. If you sign in with Google on the web, Google sends us your name, email address and profile picture.

3.2 Trip and Planning Data

Trips you create or join; destinations, places, and itineraries; travel preferences (e.g. budget, pace, interests); group membership and roles; your availability and your answers to the organiser’s questions.

3.3 User-Generated Content

Messages in the trip chat; conversations with Hector, our AI assistant; notes and saved items; decisions such as polls, selections, and itinerary updates; expenses you record; packing lists; and photos, documents and booking emails you upload or forward to a trip. A forwarded email stays private to the person who forwarded it unless they choose to share a document from it with the trip.

3.4 Hotel Bookings

When you search for places to stay, we send your dates, the number of rooms, adults and children, your currency, and the nationality on your profile (GB until you set one) to our booking partner, Nuitée, so it can return prices. When you go on to book, the checkout runs on Nuitée’s site. Your name, contact details and card are entered there, under Nuitée’s own privacy policy, and are never sent to or stored by Crowdtrip. The link we hand to the checkout carries only the stay, the dates, the rooms and an anonymous reference number, nothing about you.

Nuitée then tells us the outcome: the booking reference, the hotel, dates, rooms, price, cancellation terms and the hotel’s confirmation code. We record these against the trip so the group can see the stay is booked and who it covers. You choose which members of the trip to name on a booking.

3.5 Usage and Technical Data

Interaction data, device and browser information, app version, and log data for debugging and performance monitoring. Our product analytics (Umami) run on our own server, do not use cookies, and are never shared with anyone else. Analytics events from the website and the app are tagged with your account number and plan, not your name or email.

We also keep a record of each request made to Hector and of each automatic analysis of an upload, including what was sent to the AI model and what came back, so we can fix problems, control costs and improve answers.

3.6 Push Notifications

If you allow notifications in the Crowdtrip app, we store a push token for your phone (an identifier for that app install, not for you personally), its platform and app version. We use it to tell you about things in your trips that are waiting on you, such as a poll, a task or a date to confirm. Notifications are delivered by Expo’s push service and then by Apple or Google. The notification text is the trip’s name and a one-line summary, the same line you see in your inbox. You can turn notifications off in the app’s settings or your phone’s settings. Signing out deactivates the token.

3.7 Microphone and Dictation

In the app you can dictate messages to Hector instead of typing them. This uses your phone’s own speech recognition (Apple’s on iPhone, Google’s on Android), which may send audio to that provider under its privacy policy. We receive only the resulting text. The microphone is used only while you are dictating and only after you have granted permission.

3.8 Photo Location Data

Photos often contain embedded location data (GPS coordinates) recorded automatically by the device that took them. When you upload a photo, Crowdtrip reads this location data, where present, and uses it to tag the photo with the place it was taken. Location tags may be shown alongside your photos in trip features such as the shared trip diary/blog and itinerary place views, visible to your fellow trip members. You can remove or edit a photo's location tag at any time.

If a trip, or its diary/blog, is set to public, Crowdtrip automatically strips location data from photos before they are shown to anyone outside the trip's private membership. Location tags are only ever visible to a trip's own members, never to the public.

4. How We Use Your Information

We use your information to provide and operate the Crowdtrip platform, enable group travel planning and coordination, generate trip suggestions and recommendations, power Hector, arrange hotel bookings through our booking partner, send you notifications about your trips, improve product performance and user experience, and maintain security and prevent misuse. We do not use your data for third-party advertising or resale.

5. AI and Automated Processing

5.1 How AI is used

AI is used to generate travel suggestions and recommendations, help structure itineraries, assist with decision-making, and provide conversational support via Hector. AI is also used automatically when you upload content: photos are analysed to generate captions and tags so they can be organised and searched, and documents such as receipts, tickets, and confirmations are analysed to extract structured details (for example dates, amounts, and booking references) so they can be matched to your itinerary. This automatic analysis happens as part of uploading, for all users, and does not require you to ask Hector directly.

5.2 Data shared with AI providers

When you interact with Hector, or upload a photo or document, the relevant content (including input text, trip context, and image or document content) is sent over an encrypted connection to our AI providers to generate a response or extract information. We use these providers’ paid, business APIs, under which they do not use your content to train their models.

5.3 Important limitations

Automatic analysis of uploaded photos and documents does not change your trip, itinerary, or expenses on its own. Any suggestion generated this way — such as adding an item to your itinerary — must be reviewed and confirmed by a user before it takes effect. AI responses are suggestions only and should be reviewed by users. Your data is not used to train public AI models.

6. Data Sharing

6.1 Service providers

We use the following providers to run Crowdtrip. Each receives only what it needs for its task and processes it on our behalf under its own data processing terms.

  • OVHcloud (France): the servers that run Crowdtrip and its database.
  • DigitalOcean (Frankfurt, Germany): storage for uploaded photos and documents, and encrypted database backups.
  • Nuitée (LiteAPI): hotel search, prices and bookings. Nuitée runs the checkout and takes payment, as described in 3.4, and is a data controller in its own right for the booking you make with it.
  • Google: Gemini, the AI model behind Hector and upload analysis; Google Maps and Places for maps, place details and photos; and Google sign-in on the web, if you choose it.
  • OpenAI: AI analysis of web pages you save to a trip.
  • Zyte: fetching the web pages you save to a trip, so they can be read.
  • Resend: sending our emails, and receiving the booking emails you forward to a trip.
  • Expo: delivering push notifications from the app, which then pass through Apple’s and Google’s notification services.
  • Open-Meteo and Frankfurter: weather forecasts and exchange rates. These lookups use the trip’s destination and currency only, never your personal details.
  • Unsplash: destination photos, loaded from Unsplash’s servers.
  • Google Fonts, cdnjs, jsDelivr and unpkg: fonts and page scripts loaded from their servers.

When your browser or phone loads maps, photos, fonts or scripts from these providers, it sends them your IP address and device details, as happens with any web page.

6.2 Within your trip

Information you add to a trip may be visible to other members of that trip. Private data, such as personal notes, private documents and your conversations with Hector, remains private to you. The hotel you book, its dates and who it covers are shown to the trip; the price, booking reference and cancellation deadline are shown only to the person who booked.

6.3 No data selling

We do not sell your personal data to third parties.

7. Public and Private Trip Data

Private trips are visible only to invited members. Public trips may be visible to attendees. Your private plans, notes, and AI interactions remain private.

Anyone who has a trip’s join link can see a preview before joining: the inviter’s first name, the trip’s name, destination and dates, and its cover photo. Nothing else is visible until an organiser lets them in. Join links stop working when the trip ends, and an organiser can replace a link at any time, which stops the old one working. Only share a join link with people you mean to invite.

Photos included in a public trip diary or blog have their location data automatically stripped before they are shown outside the trip; location tags remain visible only to the trip's own members (see 3.8).

8. Security

Every connection to Crowdtrip, from your browser, the app and between our servers and our providers, is encrypted with HTTPS. Passwords are stored as salted hashes. On your phone, sign-in tokens are kept in the device’s secure keychain, and a copy of your trips is cached on the device so they can be read offline; both are removed when you sign out.

Original photos and documents are kept in private storage and served through short-lived signed links, so a link that is shared stops working within minutes. Resized photo versions used for thumbnails and galleries are served from a cache at unguessable addresses. Database backups are encrypted (AES-256) before they leave our server, with a key that only we hold.

Crowdtrip is not end-to-end encrypted: our servers, and the AI providers we name above, need to read your trip content to do their job. Access to production systems is limited to the Dotvelocity staff who run them.

9. Data Retention

We keep your account and trip data for as long as your account is open. Server logs are kept for 14 days. Database backups are kept for about a week and then overwritten. Booking records are kept for as long as the trip exists and as long as accounting law requires.

When you ask us to delete your account, we delete your account and the personal data tied to it within one month. Content you added to a trip that others are still using, such as messages or expenses, is removed or anonymised so the trip still makes sense to them. Copies in backups expire on the normal backup cycle. A booking you made with Nuitée stays with Nuitée under its own retention rules.

10. Legal Bases for Processing

Under UK and EU data protection law (the UK GDPR and the EU GDPR), we rely on these legal bases:

  • Contract: to create your account, run the trips you create or join, and arrange the stays you book.
  • Legitimate interests: to keep Crowdtrip secure, prevent misuse, fix problems, and understand which features are used so we can improve them.
  • Consent: for push notifications and dictation on your phone, and for optional emails such as product updates. You can withdraw each of these at any time in the app’s or your phone’s settings.
  • Legal obligation: where the law requires us to keep or disclose information.

11. Cookies and Local Storage

Crowdtrip uses only the cookies it needs to work. We do not use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies, so we do not ask for cookie consent.

  • Sign-in cookies (access_token, refresh_token): keep you signed in. They are set only after you sign in.
  • Security cookie (csrftoken): protects forms such as the contact form from forgery.
  • Local storage: small preferences in your browser, such as a pending trip invitation while you create your account.

Our analytics do not set cookies. The app stores sign-in tokens and an offline copy of your trips on your phone, as described in section 8.

12. International Transfers

Our servers and file storage are in the European Union. Some providers, including Google, OpenAI, Expo and Resend, may process data in the United States. Where data leaves the UK or EU, we rely on the safeguards the law provides, such as the UK International Data Transfer Addendum, the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, or the UK Extension to the EU–US Data Privacy Framework.

13. Your Rights

You have the right to:

  • access the personal data we hold about you and get a copy of it;
  • correct data that is wrong;
  • have your data deleted;
  • restrict or object to how we use it, including anything we do on the basis of legitimate interests;
  • receive your data in a portable format;
  • withdraw consent at any time, where we rely on it.

To use any of these rights, including deleting your account or getting a copy of your data, email hello@crowdtrip.com from the address on your account. We will respond within one month.

If you are unhappy with how we handle your data, you can complain to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk, or to the data protection authority where you live. We would appreciate the chance to put things right first.

14. Children

Crowdtrip is not meant for anyone under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their data. If you believe a child under 13 has an account, contact us and we will delete it. You must be 18 or over to book a stay.

15. Changes to This Policy

When we change this policy we update the date at the top. If a change is significant, we will also let signed-in users know.

16. Contact

Dotvelocity Ltd, operating Crowdtrip. Email hello@crowdtrip.com, or use the contact page.