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Privacy Policy

This website “www.castleinthesand.com” is operated by Castle in the Sand, Inc. (“the Castle”) and this policy applies to all websites owned, operated, controlled and otherwise made available by the Castle, its affiliates and subsidiaries (including, but not limited to the Barefoot Mailman and the Green Turtle Club, co-branded and/or successor sites). Our office address is:

Castle In the Sand
3701 Ocean Highway
Ocean City MD 21842
800 552 7263
410 289 6846

We may be reached via email at admin@castleinthesand.com

Introduction

The Castle respects the privacy and security of your personal information. The following privacy policy describes the information we collect, how we use it and what rights you have to it. By using this Website, you acknowledge and agree to the terms and conditions of this Website Privacy Policy Statement (“Privacy Policy”). If you do not agree to these terms and conditions, please do not use the Castle’s Website.

We reserve the right to change or modify our privacy practices that are described herein from time to time simply by posting a revised Privacy Policy on our Website. Any such change shall be effective immediately upon posting of the revised Privacy Policy on our Website. We reserve the right to make the revised or changed Privacy Policy effective for information we already have about you, as well as any information we receive in the future. We encourage you to refer to this Privacy Policy on an ongoing basis so that you understand our current privacy practices.

Privacy Policy

Like many websites, we gather information about how visitors use our Website. We also gather information about you from services other than a website including, but not limited to, the telephone, mail and third party vendors. In general, you can visit many of the web pages on our Website without telling us who you are or revealing any personal information about yourself. We, however, may track your Internet Protocol (IP) address and other anonymous information from your web browser for trends and statistics (including, but not limited to, browser version, pages requested and pages visited), but you will remain anonymous unless you provide us with personal information during your visit to our Website or during an earlier or subsequent visit and we are able to link your IP address between your current visit and one of these other visits.

We also work with service providers who use tracking technologies to serve ads across the Internet or track email communication response rates on our behalf. These companies may collect personal information about your visits to our Website and your interaction with our communications, including advertising.

In addition to anonymous information, we also collect personal information from you at our Website when you voluntarily submit it to us. We request personal information from you (which may include your name, address, telephone number, email address, gender, year of birth, and when necessary, credit card information) when you:

  • Complete a reservation or other form;
  • Sign-up to receive email newsletters or other correspondence;
  • Participate in a promotion;
  • Request a brochure or other materials from us; and/or
  • Request e-mail, fax, mail or telephone support or services.

We also collect information about your activities on and through our Website from our third party business partners, suppliers, vendors and other agents.

You may choose not to provide us with any personal information. In such event, you can still access and use many portions of our Website; however, you will not be able to access and use those portions of our Website or the services available on or through our Website that require your personal information.

Using Information

We may use the information we collect to:

  • Customize and/or personalize your communications, surfing, viewing, reservations and/or website experience;
  • Better respond to your customer service inquiries;
  • Communicate with you about your reservation or customer service needs;
  • Communicate with you about our hotel properties and events, and for other promotional purposes;
  • Improve our business;
  • Administer contests, promotions, surveys or other website features;
  • Provide technical support to you; and
  • Perform any other lawful acts except for those acts expressly prohibited by the terms and conditions set forth herein.

Sharing Information

Except as expressly set forth herein, we do not loan, give away, sell, distribute or rent your personal information to any third party.

For the purpose of operating our business and providing you with prompt reservation services and payments, we may disclose your personal information to one or more of our business partners, distributors, suppliers, affiliates, service providers or other third parties who are assisting the Castle in performing these services. Without limiting the foregoing, these third parties may provide the Castle with payment processing, reservation service, data management, email distribution, live text chat, email response, market research, information analysis, and promotions management services. We provide such parties with the personal information they need to perform their respective services and we use commercially reasonable efforts to require them to safeguard your personal information and limit their use of it.

We also may provide your personal information to other Castle-affiliated companies (including, but not limited to our affiliated properties, the Barefoot Mailman and the Green Turtle Club, and subsidiaries) which may be outside the United States, and who may use your personal information for any legal purposes whatsoever.

We also may disclose personal information about you upon request by the government; in response to a court order; when required by law or when we believe in good faith is required by law; to enforce our Privacy Policy, terms and conditions or other agreements and polices on our Website; upon your request; or to contact, identify or bring legal action against someone who may be causing injury to or interference with our or others’ rights or property including, but not limited to, claims for infringement of intellectual property, invasions of privacy or situations involving threats or alleged threats to the physical safety of a person’s property. We may also share information with companies assisting in fraud protection or investigation. We do not provide information to these agencies or companies for marketing purposes.

We may also provide aggregated, non-personally identifiable information to third parties for any legal purposes whatsoever.

Protecting Your Information

We use commercially reasonable efforts to safeguard and secure your personal information while stored on our computer systems. We use a variety of industry standard security measures, including encryption and authentication tools, to maintain the confidentiality of your personal information. Your personal information is stored behind industry standard firewalls and is only accessible by a limited number of persons who are authorized to access such systems, and are required to keep the information confidential. Regardless of these efforts by us, no system connected to the internet can be guaranteed to be 100% secure.

We use commercially reasonable effort to safeguard and secure the transmission of your personal information from your computer to our computers. When you place orders or access your personal information, we offer the use of a secure server. To the extent you select the secure server method or your browser supports such functionality, all credit card information you supply is transmitted via Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology. Regardless of these efforts by us, no data transmission over the public Internet can be guaranteed to be 100% secure.

Cookies and Pixel Tags

Our Website uses cookies. A cookie is a small, removable data file that is stored by your web browser on your computer. Cookies allow you to make a reservation on our Website and allow us to enhance, facilitate and personalize your online booking and vacation planning experience. For example, we use cookies to:

  • Remember your booking preferences;
  • Recognize you when you return to our Website;
  • Enable you to use our one-click checkout;
  • Present relevant content to you when you visit our Website;
  • Analyze visitor behavior;
  • Provide you with relevant advertisements from the Castle and other advertisers on unrelated websites; and
  • Facilitate other similar types of activities.

You can choose to have your computer warn you each time a cookie is being sent or you can choose to turn off all cookies. You do this through your web browser settings. If you turn cookies off, you won’t have access to many features that make your visit to our Website more efficient and enjoyable, and in some cases, some of our services will not function or will function with limited capability.

Interest-Based Advertising

Advertising services use pixel tags (a/k/a web beacons), cookies and other tracking technologies to collect and store non-personal information about your visit to our website. Should you visit our website using your mobile device, an advertising service may also collect your device’s unique identifier, or location, and attempt to synchronize your mobile website visit with other website visits.

When a relevant advertisement is served to you on another website that uses data collected from this website, it is referred to as an ‘Interest-Based’ Ad, and the advertisement should include a blue ‘Adchoices’ icon in the upper-right hand corner. If you click on the Adchoices icon, you can learn more about the facilitating advertising service, and your opportunity to opt-out of Interest-Based ads from that service. The Castle does not have access to, nor control over, these advertising services use of cookies when Interest-Based ads are served to you. However, you may choose to opt-out of the use of this information by clicking here: http://www.aboutads.info/choices/.

Please note that by opting out, you will continue to see ads, but they may not be as relevant based on your travel.

Tell a Friend

If a user elects to use our referral service for informing a friend about our site, we ask them for the friend’s name and email address. The Castle collects the email address of your friend for the sole purpose of automatically sending the friend an email inviting them to visit the site but does not store this information.

Do Not Track

Currently, our systems do not recognize browser “do-not-track” signals. You may, however, disable certain tracking as discussed in this section (e.g. by disabling cookies); you also may opt out of targeted advertising by following the instructions at the DAA and the Network Advertising initiative websites.

Location Information and Services

We may receive information about your location during the course of and for the purpose of providing you the services described above through your use of our website and mobile applications. For example, if you are using our mobile applications and have consented to sharing your location information with us, this information might be collected through GPS or Bluetooth technologies to enable us to provide certain services to you, such as customized offers and promotions. In addition to your use of our websites and mobile applications, we may also receive location information from wireless networks or cellular towers in proximity to your mobile devise, through your Internet protocol (“IP”) address, or through your use of other services we provide at our hotels, such as wireless Internet services. We may also have access to location information that you provide to us through your use of social media, such as when you “tweet” your location. Your location preferences can be set or modified at the device level or through modifying your settings with the relevant social media platform.

Social Media

We may use various social media features such as the Facebook “Like” button on our websites and mobile applications. Certain information may be shared or otherwise provided to us through your use of these features in conjunction with our services and programs. Subject to your account and privacy settings, we may also be able to see information that you post when using these social media platforms, whether or not you are using one of our services. The information you post on social media sites, as well as the controls surrounding these disclosures, are governed by the respective policies of these third parties.

Children's Online Privacy

We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under the age of 13. Our Website is not intended to solicit information of any kind from children under the age of 13, and we have made commercially reasonable efforts to design our Website to prevent our knowing acceptance of any such information.

It is possible that by fraud, deception or error, we may receive information pertaining to children under the age of 13. If we are notified of this, as soon as we verify the information, we will immediately obtain parental consent or otherwise delete the information from our servers. If you want to notify us of our receipt of personal information belonging to a child under the age of 13, please do so at admin@castleinthesand.com.

Email Marketing Practices

We adhere to the highest standards in our email marketing practices. When you choose to opt-into our email communications and submit your email address to us, we will send you an email requesting your confirmation. If you do not click on the confirmation link in the email, you will not be registered to receive our emails. This protects your inbox from unwanted emails should someone else provide your email address, or should you change your mind.

Chat Rooms and Forums

Our Website may now or in the future include web logs (i.e., blogs), chat rooms, forums, message boards, and/or news groups. Any information that is disclosed in these areas becomes public information. You should exercise caution before disclosing your personal information via these public venues, which you do at your own risk. If you do so, you may receive, among other things, unsolicited emails or “spam” from others. The Castle cannot safeguard the privacy of personal information that is disclosed online in this manner.

Other Websites

When browsing our Website, you may be directed to other websites that are beyond our control. These other websites may use cookies and pixel tags, collect data, or solicit personal information. Even though the Castle may be affiliated with these websites, we have no control over them or how they collect, distribute or otherwise use your personal information or how they safeguard and secure your personal information. The Castle is not responsible or liable for the conduct, policies or actions of the owners of such websites or the content displayed on these websites. These websites are linked to our Website only for your convenience and you access them at your own risk.

Unsubscribing, Removing or Modifying Your Information

We want to communicate with you only if you want to hear from us.

You may unsubscribe from receiving emails from us at any time by using the link included at the bottom of each email communication. You may also unsubscribe by sending us an email at admin@castleinthesand.com.

In some limited circumstances, such as to resolve disputes, troubleshoot problems and enforce our Website Terms and Conditions of Use Agreement, we may retain in our files information you have requested to remove. Further, your personal information is never completely removed from our databases due to technical constraints and the fact that we back up our systems. Therefore, you should not expect that all of your personal information will be completely removed from our databases in response to your requests.

We reserve the right to send you certain communications related to our Website that are considered part of your account, such as technical alerts, without offering you the opportunity to opt out of receiving them.

Phishing

Phishing is the illegal attempt to mislead people into providing personal or financial information, including credit card numbers, login IDs, passwords and Social Security numbers, via email or through fraudulent websites. The most frequent phishing attacks occur through email disguised to appear as though it came from a reputable company. Most phishing attempts urge you to update or validate your account information, typically through a link in an email directing you to a fake website that appears to be legitimate.
Do not provide your personal or financial information in response to an email request or after clicking on a link from an email. The Castle does not ask for this type of information through an email communication.

To help protect your computer and personal information, make sure you have current anti-virus and firewall software installed on your computer and update such software on a regular basis. Also, please review your credit card statements carefully and verify that all transactions are authorized and report any discrepancies immediately to your credit card company.

To learn more about phishing scams, you may wish to visit www.antiphishing.org or www.consumer.gov/idtheft.

Some sections of our Website may require you to set up a user ID and password. We recommend that you do not divulge your password to anyone. The Castle will never ask you for your password in an unsolicited telephone call or email. If you suspect you have received a fraudulent email from the Castle or any of its affiliates, please contact us immediately at admin@castleinthesand.com.

Special Information for California Consumers

California residents may request a list of certain third parties to which we have disclosed personally identifiable information about you for their own direct marketing purposes. You may make one request per calendar year. In your request, please attest to the fact that you are a California resident and provide a current California address for your response. You may request this information in writing by contacting us through one of the methods listed under the “How to contact us” section. Please allow up to thirty (30) days for a response.

Questions and Feedback

We welcome your questions, comments, and concerns about this Privacy Policy and our privacy practices. Please send us feedback at admin@castleinthesand.com pertaining to these matters or any other issue you may have with the Castle or our Website.

If you feel that we are not following our stated Privacy Policy, you may also contact state or local chapters of the Better Business Bureau, your state or local consumer protection office, or The Federal Trade Commission by phone at 202-FTC-HELP (202.382.4357) or at http://www.ftc.gov/ftc/complaint.htm.