Cookie Policy
What a cookie actually is
A cookie is a small text file that a website asks your browser to store, so that something can be remembered between page loads: a setting, a session, or an identifier that ties your visits together. Related technologies, such as local storage and tracking pixels, do similar jobs by different means, and this page uses the word cookie for all of them. Cookies are not programs, they cannot read your files, and most of them are mundane. The reason the law makes sites explain them is the minority that follow you across the web, and a travel site that sends readers off to airlines and booking engines all day owes you a particularly clear explanation.
The kinds we use
Cookies on travelhifi.com fall into four groups:
- Essential cookies. These make the site function: security tokens, load balancing, and the cookie that records your consent choices themselves. They run without asking because the site does not work without them.
- Preference cookies. These remember choices you have made, such as a dismissed notice or a display setting, so you are not asked again on every visit.
- Analytics cookies. These let us count readers and see which articles and guides get read, in aggregate. They tell us that a destination guide is popular; they do not tell us who you are.
- Advertising cookies. These are set by the ad partners that fund the site. They measure whether ads were shown and, where you have consented, build interest profiles used to personalise the ads you see here and elsewhere.
Affiliate cookies, and what happens when you click a deal
This is the part specific to a travel site, so it gets its own section. Some links on TRAVELHIFI are affiliate links. When you click one, you leave our site, and the merchant or its affiliate network sets a cookie in your browser recording that you arrived from us. If you then book a flight, reserve a room or buy the bag within that cookie’s window, we earn a commission. The merchant pays it; the price you pay does not change.
Two honest details about how this works. First, the cookie is set by the destination site, not by us, and it lives under their policy and their controls. Second, what we get back is aggregate: numbers of clicks and commissions earned. We never see your name, your itinerary or your payment details, and we would not want to. Which links are affiliate links, and why commissions never influence recommendations, is covered in our editorial standards and on the ownership and funding page.
Who else sets cookies here
Third parties set cookies on travelhifi.com in three situations: advertising partners serving and measuring ads, analytics providers doing the counting described above, and embedded content. When an article embeds a map, a video or a social media post, the embed comes from the platform that hosts it, and that platform may set its own cookies when the embed loads. Those cookies are governed by the platform’s policy, not ours, and where the consent framework allows it we keep such embeds from loading until you have consented.
Personalised advertising, and what changes if you refuse
If you consent to advertising cookies, the ads you see may be personalised: click through to a fare to Lisbon and you may see Lisbon hotels advertised for a while afterwards. If you refuse, you still see ads, because ads pay for the site, but they are contextual rather than personal, matched to the page instead of to you. Refusing costs you nothing else: no article, guide or deal on this site is ever gated behind advertising consent.
Changing your answer
The first time you visit, a banner asks what you will allow, and nothing optional runs before you answer. You can change your mind at any time:
- Reopen the cookie settings via the link in the site footer and change your choices there.
- Delete cookies for travelhifi.com in your browser, which resets the banner on your next visit.
- Use your browser’s controls to block third-party cookies entirely, which most modern browsers support well.
- Use the opt-out tools published by the major advertising alliances for interest-based advertising generally.
Blocking essential cookies through aggressive browser settings can break parts of the site, which is the one trade-off we cannot remove.
How long they last, and what to read next
Session cookies vanish when you close the browser. Persistent cookies carry an expiry set by whoever created them: our preference cookies last months rather than years, analytics identifiers have fixed lifetimes set by the provider, and affiliate cookie windows are set by each merchant and vary widely. We review the cookies in use on the site periodically and remove anything that no longer earns its keep.
How the resulting data is handled as personal data, and the rights you have over it, live in the privacy policy. Questions about anything on this page go to support@travelhifi.com with PRIVACY in the subject line. This page is updated whenever our cookie usage changes in a way a reader would care about.
