Privacy Policy

The Charleston Area CVB (hereinafter, “CACVB”) is committed to maintaining the trust and confidence of the visitors to both our region and our web site. In this Privacy Policy, we’ve outlined detailed information on how, why, and when we collect your personal information, how we use it, the limited conditions under which we may disclose it to others, and how we keep it secure.

If you have questions about this privacy policy, you may contact us by email at datamanagement@explorecharleston.com, by mail at ATTN Data Management, 375 Meeting Street, Charleston, SC. 29403; or by telephone at 843-853-8000.

 

Demographic Data

On this website we collect demographic data from Google's Interest-based advertising with Google Analytics. Visitors can opt-out of Google Analytics for Display advertising and customize Google Display Network ads using the ads setting.

 

Personal Information We Collect & Why We Collect It

Your provision of your personal information to us is completely voluntary. “Personal information” is information that can specifically identify you. We do not collect personal information unless you submit that information to us. Categories of personal information we may collect include:

 

Information You Give Us

We obtain information about you when you use our website, request one of our visitor guides, take an interactive quiz, or subscribe to email newsletters. You can also provide us personal information via phone, chatting via our live chat service on the website, personal emails, or US Post.

You can choose not to provide certain information. We use the information that you provide for such purposes as responding to your requests, improving our services, and communicating with you.

 

Information From Other Sources

We also sometimes receive updated delivery and address information from our shippers or other sources so that we can update our records and communicate more easily.

 

What type of data or information is collected from you?

The personal information we collect when you browse our website, submit a visitor guide request, subscribe to email, or take an interactive quiz might include your:

  • Name
  • Address
  • Email address
  • Phone number
  • Originating airport
  • Trip start and end dates
  • Your trip interest categories
  • Your list of “favorite” trip destinations
  • Your location (based on your IP address)
  • Your quiz answers
  • Your communication and marketing preferences
  • Your correspondence and communications with the CACVB

This list is not exhaustive and, in specific instances, we may need to collect additional data for the purposes set out in this Policy. Some of the above personal data is collected directly, for example when you request a visitor guide, or send an email to our service team. Other personal data is collected indirectly, for example your browsing activity.

Our websites are not intended for children and we do not knowingly collect data relating to children.

 

Use of 'cookies'

Like many other websites, the CACVB website uses cookies. 'Cookies' are small pieces of information sent by an organization to your computer and stored on your hard drive to allow that website to recognize you when you visit. They collect statistical data about your browsing actions and patterns and do not identify you as an individual. For example, we use cookies to store your selected trip start and end date. This helps us to improve our website and deliver a better more personalized service.

 

What types of cookies does the CACVB use, and why?

  • Necessary: cookies required for access to the Site and core functionality.
  • Behavior and analytics: cookies used to gather behavioral information through the Site; provide customized content and recommendations; and analytics.
  • Marketing: cookies that are used to deliver relevant advertising.
  • Behavioral information collected by our web analytics vendor is used to analyze data pertaining to visitor trends, research consumption, and research grading in order to improve our research, plan Site enhancements, and measure overall Site effectiveness. We may also use cookies or web beacons to help us offer you products, programs, or services that may be of interest to you and to deliver relevant advertising. We may use third-party advertising companies to help tailor site content to users or to serve ads on our behalf. These companies may also employ cookies and web beacons to measure advertising effectiveness.
  • Aggregated (non-personally identifiable) user behavior collected through cookies or web beacons may be shared with our other third-party service providers to either analyze or execute marketing programs.
  • Cookies and web beacons do not contain personally identifiable information; however, if you are a registered user, we may store this information with your registration information to enable us to better serve you.
  • What can you do about cookies? You may choose to control and/or delete all cookies from your hard drive. If you delete a cookie, however, please be advised that some features of our site may not be accessible to you. Another option available to you is to change the preferences or settings in your web browser to control cookies. In some cases, you can choose to accept cookies from a primary Site, block them from third parties, or clear out all cookies.

 

Other Cookie-based Tracking

We use several marketing platforms that utilize cookies to help analyze user behavior and better target our marketing to you.

  • We use marketing platforms provided by Facebook, Inc. and Google to place advertising.
  • We use the Sharpspring platform as our primary database to house information provided to us and send email marketing when requested.

 

Sharing of Cookie Data

The CACVB allows its members to access anonymized cookie data from our visitor browsing history. By accepting our site’s cookie and privacy policy you agree to this sharing.

 

IP Address

In addition to Google Analytics, this website may collect information (already held in the public domain) attributed to the IP address of the computer or device that is being used to access it.

 

Email Marketing

We use a third-party provider, Sharpspring, to deliver our newsletter. We gather statistics around email opening and clicks using industry standard technologies to help us monitor and improve our e-newsletter. For more information, please see Sharpspring’s privacy notice.

 

Unsubscribe or Opt-Out

You can unsubscribe to general mailings at any time of the day or night by clicking the unsubscribe link at the bottom of any of our emails or by emailing datamanagement@explorecharleston.com

As another layer of security, we utilize a double-opt in process for each subscription request. If you sign up for email, you’ll be required to verify your email exists by clicking a link.

While your email address remains within our Sharpspring database, you will receive periodic (approximately one per month) newsletter-style emails from us.

If you’ve provided your trip start and end date, and opted in to receive emails from the CACVB, you may receive emails leading up to your trip date, and a survey after your trip date.

 

THIRD PARTY SERVICES

Our Third Party Data Processors

We use a number of third parties to process personal or aggregated (anonymous) data on our behalf. These third parties have been carefully chosen and all of them comply with the appropriate legislation. All of these third parties are based in the USA and are EU-U.S Privacy Shield compliant.

 

Our Third Party Service Providers and Partners

In order to make certain services available to you, we may need to share your personal data with some of our service partners. These include our IT, local marketing partners, and marketing service providers.

Aside from our service providers, the CACVB will not disclose your personal data to any third party, except as set out below. We will never sell or rent our customer data to other organizations for marketing purposes without your explicit consent.

If you choose to share your data, we may share your name, email address, and phone number. We may share your data with:

  • Charleston-based partners if we have your consent to do so (via an opt-in checkbox on our visitor guide or wedding guide request form);
  • Our business partners, operational service providers and subcontractors and other third parties;
  • Governmental bodies, regulators, law enforcement agencies, courts/tribunals and insurers where we are required to do so:
    • to comply with our legal obligations;
    • to exercise our legal rights (for example in court cases);
    • for the prevention, detection, investigation of crime or prosecution of offenders; and
    • for the protection of our employees and customers.

 

How is your information used, and how long is it kept?

We use information held about you to perform our services and for other purposes outlined below. Specifically, we use your information for a variety of purposes:

  • Process and mail your request for a visitor guide that you have submitted via our website, live chat, phone, or email inquiry;
  • Seek your views or comments on your experience during your trip;
  • Notify you of changes to our services;
  • Send you communications which you have requested and that may be of interest to you. These may include information about events, travel planning resources, and special offers for our partners
  • Better target advertising of our members and destination
  • With your approval, share relevant marketing materials from partners

 

Data Retention

We will only retain your information for as long as necessary to fulfill the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements. To determine the appropriate retention period for your information, we consider the amount, nature, and sensitivity of the information, the potential risk of harm from unauthorized use or disclosure of your information, the purposes for which we process your information and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and the applicable legal requirements.

In some circumstances you can ask us to delete your data: see Request erasure below for further information.

In some circumstances we may anonymize information about you (so that it can no longer be associated with you) for research or statistical purposes in which case we may use and retain this information indefinitely without further notice to you.

 

Profiling

We may analyze your personal information and interests to create a profile of your interests and preferences so that we can contact you or serve you advertising with information relevant to you.

 

Links to other websites

Our website may contain links to other websites run by other organizations. This privacy policy applies only to our website‚ so we encourage you to read the privacy statements on the other websites you visit. We cannot be responsible for the privacy policies and practices of other sites even if you access them using links from our website.

In addition, if you linked to our website from a third party site, we cannot be responsible for the privacy policies and practices of the owners and operators of that third party site and recommend that you check the policy of that third party site.

 

Website recordings

Our web site may also use the HotJar web site recording service. HotJar may record mouse clicks, mouse movements, page scrolling and any text keyed into website forms. The information collected does not include any sensitive personal data. Data collected by HotJar is for the CACVB’s internal use only. The information collected is used to improve our website usability and is stored and used for aggregated and statistical reporting.

 

Data Security

We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent information about you from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorized way, altered or disclosed; however, due to the inherent open nature of the Internet, we cannot ensure or warrant the security of any information provided online. We have put in place procedures to deal with any suspected data breach that will affect you and will notify you and any applicable regulator of a breach where we are legally required to do so.

 

Request to Exercise Individual Rights

To exercise any of your rights as described below, please contact us in writing, via email or postal mail as indicated above, so that we may consider your request under applicable law. Please be aware that your request will not be accepted for review unless you provide the following:

  • The name, user ID, pseudonym, email address, or other identifier that you have used to use our Platform, or if you are not a registered user of the service, or have not otherwise previously interacted with us, your first and last name and an address where we can correspond with you.
  • State or Country in which you are located.
  • Clear description of the information or content you wish to receive or to be deleted or corrected, or the action you wish to be taken; and
  • Sufficient information to allow us to locate the content or information to be deleted, removed or corrected

For your protection, we may only implement requests with respect to the personal data associated with the particular email address that you use to send us your request.

In addition, please note that, depending on the nature of your inquiry, request or complaint, we may need to verify your identity before implementing your request and may require proof of identity, such as in the form of a government issued ID and proof of geographical address.

We will try to comply with your request as soon as reasonably practicable. However, we reserve the right to refuse to act on a request that is manifestly unfounded or excessive (for example because it is repetitive) and/or, in some cases, to charge a fee that takes into account the administrative costs for providing the information or the communication or taking the action requested.

 

EU/EEA Residents: Data Subject Rights under the GDPR

The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) grants individuals who are in the European Union and European Economic Area (EU/EEA) the following rights, with some limitations. Users may contact us, at the address provided in the “How to Contact us” section below, to exercise any of those rights and we will respond with the requested action or information, or will let you know why that right does not apply to you.

 

Right Not to Provide Consent or to Withdraw Consent

We may seek to rely on your consent in order to process certain personal data. Where we do so, you have the right not to provide your consent, and the right to withdraw your consent at any time. If you withdraw your consent, this will not affect the lawfulness of the processing conducted based on consent before its withdraw.

 

Right of Access

You have the right to obtain confirmation as to whether or not we collect or process personal data concerning you and, if this is the case, you have the right to request a copy of such personal data in digital format.

 

Right of Rectification

You have the right to require that we correct any inaccurate personal data concerning you, and that we complete incomplete personal data.

 

Right of Erasure

In certain circumstances, you have the right to request that we erase personal data concerning you; for example, if it is no longer necessary for the purposes for which it was originally collected.

 

Right to Restrict Processing

In certain circumstances, you have the right to request that we restrict the processing of the personal data that we have collected about you; for example, where you believe that the personal data that hold about you is not accurate or lawfully held.

 

Right to Data Portability

In certain circumstances, you have the right to receive the personal data concerning you that you have provided us in a structured, commonly used, machine readable format, and the right to obtain that we transmit the data to another entity where technically feasible.

 

Right to Object to the Processing

In certain circumstances, you have the right to request that we stop processing your personal data.

 

Right to Object to the Processing for Direct Marketing Purposes

You have the right to request that we stop sending you marketing communications.

 

Right Not to be Subject to Decisions Based Solely on Automated Processing that Produce Legal Effects

In certain circumstances, you have the right no to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing – including profiling – that produces legal effects or similarly affects you.

 

Right to Complain to a Supervisory Authority

You have the right to lodge complaint with a supervisory authority if you believe that our processing of personal data relating to you infringes the GDPR.

To exercise your rights, please contact us at datamanagement@explorecharleston.com.