Effective date: 25 August 2026
Who is responsible
Worth the Way determines the purposes and means of the processing described in this notice. Privacy questions and rights requests may be sent to hello@worththeway.com. Worth the Way is the publication name used for its public-facing operations.
What this notice covers
Worth the Way is an editorial travel publication. It does not currently operate customer accounts, accept travel bookings, process travel payments, or store live hotel inventory. This notice covers the public website, correspondence sent to the public email address, website analytics, and cookie-free affiliate click events when commercial links are enabled.
Website delivery and analytics
Vercel hosts the site and may process technical request and security information needed to deliver and protect it. Production Vercel Web Analytics receives redacted page paths, framework routes, referrers, timestamps, coarse location, device class, operating system, and browser information. Worth the Way removes query strings and fragments before transmission and does not send custom visitor identifiers. Vercel Web Analytics is configured without analytics cookies.
Sanity supplies published editorial content and media. Zoho Mail receives correspondence only when a person chooses to email Worth the Way.
Affiliate click events
If a reader selects an approved commercial link, Worth the Way records a cookie-free event in Supabase. The event may contain independent event and request identifiers, the page and content identifiers, destination identifier, affiliate-link identifier, partner, placement, call-to-action variant, broad referrer category, device class, and an optional two-letter country code.
Worth the Way does not store a persistent affiliate-session identifier in the browser. The event does not contain a raw IP address, raw user-agent string, full referrer, search query, email address, or partner destination URL. Raw affiliate events are automatically deleted after 90 days.
Partner websites
A commercial link may lead to Expedia or another clearly identified partner. Once a visitor leaves Worth the Way, the partner's own privacy and cookie practices apply. Under Expedia's current Creator Program terms, Expedia may use its own seven-day booking cookie after a visitor reaches its site. Worth the Way does not control or extend that cookie and is not the merchant of record for a partner booking.
Why we process information
For visitors in the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom, Worth the Way relies primarily on legitimate interests to operate and secure the publication, understand aggregated readership, and measure whether commercial recommendations are useful. These activities are limited through data minimization, cookie-free measurement, query-string redaction, and short raw-event retention. Correspondence is processed to respond to the sender and take requested steps. Information may also be processed when necessary to comply with a legal obligation. Where consent is required for a future feature, that feature will not be used until the required choice is provided.
Service providers and international processing
Worth the Way uses Vercel for hosting and analytics, Sanity for editorial content and media, Zoho Mail for correspondence, and Supabase for operational affiliate events. A commercial partner such as Expedia processes information under its own privacy terms after a visitor follows a partner link. These providers may process information in countries outside the visitor's country. Where applicable law requires a transfer safeguard, processing is subject to the provider's contractual safeguards or another lawful transfer mechanism. Contact hello@worththeway.com for information about safeguards relevant to a request.
Retention
Raw affiliate click events are deleted after 90 days. Correspondence is kept only for as long as reasonably needed to respond and meet applicable obligations. Hosting, security, content-delivery, and analytics records are retained according to the relevant provider configuration and terms and only for as long as needed for the purposes described above. Aggregated, non-identifying reporting may be retained for longer.
Your rights
Depending on applicable law, a person may have rights to request access, correction, deletion, restriction, objection, or portability, or to withdraw consent where processing relies on consent. Requests may be sent to hello@worththeway.com. Worth the Way may request information reasonably needed to verify the requester and will respond within the period required by applicable law. Withdrawing consent does not affect processing that was lawful before withdrawal.
Complaints
A person may complain to the data protection authority where they live, work, or believe an infringement occurred. Contacting a regulator does not prevent a person from contacting Worth the Way first at hello@worththeway.com.
Children and automated decisions
Worth the Way is a general-audience editorial publication and is not designed to collect personal information from children. Worth the Way does not make decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects about visitors using automated processing of their personal information.
Changes to this notice
This notice will be updated when Worth the Way materially changes its data practices, service providers, commercial programs, or public features. The effective date above identifies the current version.