Four things arrive here and nothing else does. A request form. A message sent straight to overland@birchwaypoint.com. A phone call to (336) 680-4173, which leaves a note in the file if it turns into a request. And the log line every web server writes when a page is served. There is no checkout on this site, no cart, no account to open and no card field anywhere, so the whole category of payment data never reaches us at all.
Two answers on the form deserve their own sentence, because they are the two that leave the building. The form asks how far ahead you are working and how far your dates can move. Both are passed to the operating company along with the rest of the request, and they have to be: a sailing or a lodge that opens its book once a year is allocated against a release date, and the company holding that book cannot check anything without knowing your window and your slack. A request that hides them gets a slower and worse answer.
Where each piece comes from
- Typed by you on the form or in a message
- Name, the email address or phone number you want a reply on, party size, the trip or the tier you are asking about, how far ahead you are working, how far your dates can move, and anything you write in the open box
- Handed over by your browser without either of us doing anything
- IP address, browser and operating system string, the page requested, the time of the request, and the site you came from if you followed a link
- Given to us by the operating company after a request goes out
- Whether the dates are open, what the company quotes, allocation notes, and later the confirmation number if you go ahead
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How long each kind sits here
- A request that never turns into a trip
- Eighteen months in the mailbox, then deleted; the tier and the month you asked about survive as a counted row with no name on it
- A request that becomes a booking
- Seven years from the last date you traveled, because the commission the operating company pays us is income and income has to be evidenced
- Server logs
- Ninety days on the host, then overwritten in the normal rotation
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The four things this site sets in your browser
- A session key
- Written when you open the request form, holds nothing but a random string so a half filled form survives a page reload, and gone when the browser closes
- A submit token
- One value, checked once, so the same request cannot be posted twice by a double click
- A preference flag
- Remembers only whether you dismissed the notice bar, so it stays dismissed
- Anything from an advertising network or an analytics vendor
- Not set, because none is loaded on any page of this site
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Turning all four off in your browser settings costs you nothing except the form remembering itself. The form still submits.
Things this office will not do with your file
We do not sell contact details, rent them, trade lists with another agency or hand them to a data broker. We do not build a profile of you across sites, because nothing on these pages is capable of watching another site. We do not add you to a mailing list off the back of a request; if a newsletter ever exists you will have to ask for it in so many words. We do not send anything about you outside the United States unless the trip itself is outside the United States and the company running it needs your name to hold a room, which is the one and only reason your details ever cross a border.
Two more. We do not ask for and will not accept a card number, a bank account, a Social Security number or a copy of an identity document, and if one arrives in a message anyway it is deleted rather than filed. And we do not keep notes about health, diet or anything of that character except where you volunteer a line the operating company must see, in which case it goes with the request and stays out of anything we count or file separately.
Requests from young travelers
Nobody under sixteen should be sending this form. The site is written for the person paying for the trip, and a family booking is made by an adult who names the children on the request. If a form arrives and it is clear a minor filled it in on their own, we delete it rather than reply to it. A parent or guardian who thinks a child sent something can write to casework@birchwaypoint.com and we will confirm in writing that it is gone.
Getting a copy, a correction or a deletion
Write to casework@birchwaypoint.com from the address the request came from, or from any address if you tell us which one to look under. Say plainly which of the three you want. seen before that working day is out; assembling a written copy of a file pricing it out needs two to four working days, because somebody has to look through the mailbox by hand rather than press a button on a system that does not exist. There is no charge and there is no form to fill in. The one thing we cannot delete on request is a record attached to a trip that already happened, for the seven years described above, and we will say so rather than quietly keep it.
Revisions to this notice
This page is edited when what we actually do changes, and not otherwise. There is no scheduled review and no version number, because a version number on a page nobody rereads is decoration. If a change means something new leaves the office, the change is set out in one line where the page begins for ninety days, and anybody with an open request at the time gets it in writing to the address on the request. Silence here means nothing has moved.