Privacy Policy

This page explains what Shemesh Tours does with your information when you use this website. It is deliberately specific: it describes what this site actually collects, not what a template assumes a website might collect.

Who is responsible

Shemesh Tours, operated by Yona Shemesh, a tour guide licensed by the Israeli Ministry of Tourism (licence 23559). If you have any question about your information, contact us using the details at the bottom of this page.

What we collect, and only when you send it

We do not ask you to create an account, and we do not collect anything about you simply because you read a page. Information reaches us only when you choose to send it, through the enquiry form or the trip planner:

Your name
Your email address
Your phone number, if you give one
Your travel dates or trip length
How many people are traveling, and the ages of any children, if you tell us
What you are interested in, and anything you write in the message box

We ask for these because we cannot answer a tour enquiry without them. Group size and children’s ages change which sites are realistic and how a day is paced, which is why the planner asks.

What we do with it

We reply to you. That is the entire purpose.
We keep your enquiry so we can follow up, and so we have a record of what was discussed if you book.
We do not sell it, rent it, or share it for marketing. Not to anyone, ever.
We do not add you to a mailing list without you asking.

Your enquiry is stored in this website’s database and a copy is emailed to us so we see it promptly. Both are read by Yona Shemesh.

Your IP address

To stop automated spam the site counts how many submissions come from an address in a given hour. It does this by storing a one-way cryptographic hash rather than the address itself, and the record is discarded automatically after an hour. Your actual IP address is never written to our database.

Cookies and analytics

This website sets no cookies of its own. There is no advertising, no retargeting and no social media tracking.

We would like to use Google Analytics to understand which pages visitors find useful. Because that does set cookies, we ask first. Until you accept, Google Analytics is not loaded at all and nothing is sent to Google. If you decline, or simply ignore the banner, it stays off.

If you accept, Google Analytics records things like which pages you viewed, roughly where in the world you are, and what kind of device you used. It does not tell us who you are. You can change your mind at any time by clearing this site’s data in your browser, which resets the question.

Two other services are contacted when a page loads, and neither is used to track you: Google Fonts, which serves the typefaces, and our host Hostinger, which delivers the site. Pages that embed a map or an Instagram post will contact Google or Meta for that content.

How long we keep things

We keep enquiries for as long as they are useful for answering you and for our records of trips we have run, and we remove them when they no longer are. If you would like your enquiry deleted sooner, ask and we will delete it.

Your rights

Under Israel’s Privacy Protection Law you may ask to see the information we hold about you, and ask for it to be corrected or deleted. If you are in the United Kingdom or the European Union, the UK GDPR and the GDPR give you those rights and others, including the right to receive a copy of your information in a portable form and to object to how we use it.

Ask us and we will do it. We will not make it difficult, and we will not charge you.

If you are in the EU or UK, our legal basis for handling your enquiry is that you asked us to, and that answering you is in our legitimate interest as the business you contacted. Analytics runs on consent, and only if you gave it.

Security

The site is served over an encrypted connection, enquiry records are not publicly viewable, and access to them is limited to Yona Shemesh. No website can promise perfect security, and we would rather say so than claim otherwise.

Children

This site is not aimed at children and we do not knowingly collect information from them. Parents planning a family trip may tell us the ages of their children so we can pace the day sensibly; that is information given by the parent, about the trip.