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Fri 11 Sep
Melbourne Tourism Guide

Privacy Policy

This policy explains what melbournetourism.org (“Melbourne Tourism Guide”) collects when you visit, why, and what you can do about it. It was last updated on 9 September 2026, and it describes how the site actually operates today rather than a generic set of possibilities.

The site is published from Australia and handles personal information in line with the Australian Privacy Act 1988 and the Australian Privacy Principles. Because a large share of readers plan Melbourne trips from Europe and the United Kingdom, it also addresses the rights those readers have under the UK and EU GDPR.

The short version

  • You can read every guide on this site without giving us anything or creating an account.
  • There is no newsletter and no mailing list, so there is nothing to be signed up to.
  • Comments are closed site-wide, so no commenter data is collected.
  • We use Google Analytics to see which guides get read. We do not sell data, and we have never done so.
  • Some booking links earn a commission if you book through them, which is explained below.
  • The only time you hand us personal information deliberately is when you send a message through the contact form.

What we collect

Information you give us

The contact form asks for your name, your email address and your message. That is the whole of it. We use it to answer you and for nothing else: it is not added to any list, not used for marketing, and not passed to a third party. Correspondence is kept while it is useful for follow-up and for handling any correction it prompted, and deleted after that. The form is provided by the Contact Form 7 plugin and messages are delivered by email to the site’s editor; the plugin does not store submissions in a database on this site.

Information collected automatically

The web server keeps standard access logs — IP address, timestamp, the page requested, browser and operating system, and the referring page. These are generated by the hosting infrastructure, used for security and diagnosing faults, and rotated on the host’s schedule. Hosting is provided by DreamHost, which processes this data on our behalf.

Analytics

The site runs Google Analytics 4, connected through the Site Kit by Google plugin. It tells us which guides are being read, roughly where readers are in the world, and which pages people leave immediately — which is how we decide what to write and what to rewrite. Google Analytics sets cookies in your browser and processes IP addresses; IP data is truncated by Google before storage, and we do not use Analytics to identify individual readers.

We also use Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights through the same plugin. Search Console reports aggregate search queries and page performance; it does not identify individual visitors.

You can opt out of Google Analytics on every site you visit by installing Google’s browser opt-out add-on, or by blocking analytics cookies in your browser settings.

Advertising

Melbourne Tourism Guide is in the process of enabling display advertising through Google AdSense; at the time of writing, ads are not yet being served. This section describes what will apply once they are, and this page will be updated to present tense when that happens.

When advertising is live, Google and its advertising partners will use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this and other websites. Google’s use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visit to this site and other sites on the internet. You can opt out of personalised advertising at any time through Google Ads Settings, and you can opt out of third-party vendors’ use of cookies for personalised advertising at aboutads.info/choices or youronlinechoices.com. Google’s own handling of data is described in its privacy and terms for partner sites.

Readers in the EEA, the UK and Switzerland will be shown a consent message before any advertising or advertising-measurement cookies are set, and personalised advertising will only be used where consent is given. That consent mechanism is being set up alongside the advertising itself; until it is live, no advertising cookies are being set on this site by anyone.

Some of the links on this site are affiliate links. Where a guide points at somewhere to stay, that link is usually one of them. Accommodation links are handled by Stay22, a booking-link service that adds a referral tag when you click through to a hotel or booking site. If you go on to book, the booking site pays us a small commission. The price you pay is the same either way, and nothing on this site is behind a paywall or conditional on using those links.

What that means for your data: when you click one of these links, the partner receives the fact that the click came from this site, along with the standard technical details any website receives, and sets its own cookie or identifier so that a booking made afterwards can be attributed and the commission paid. Melbourne Tourism Guide never sees your booking, your travel dates, your name or your payment details — what comes back to us is a count of clicks and, occasionally, the fact that a booking happened.

One detail about how that attribution works, because it is not what most cookie notices describe: Stay22 does not set a cookie. It identifies your device from characteristics of your browser and device — fingerprinting — and keeps an identifier in your browser’s local storage so a booking made later can be credited to this site. It is classified as a marketing technology in the cookie notice on this site, so if you refuse marketing storage the script does not run at all. Refusing limits nothing you can read here.

Once you follow one of those links you are on the booking partner’s own site, under their privacy policy, and this one stops applying. If you would rather not be tracked that way, refusing marketing storage in the cookie notice stops the Stay22 script running at all, and blocking third-party cookies stops the booking site’s own attribution once you are on it; the links still work and the price is unchanged.

Cookies currently in use

  • Analytics cookies set by Google Analytics 4, used to count and distinguish visits.
  • Functional cookies set by WordPress, which on this site only apply to logged-in administrators — as a reader you will not receive them.
  • A consent cookie set by the Aegis Consent plugin, recording your response to the cookie notice so it is not shown again on every page.
  • Affiliate storage created once you click one of the booking links described in this policy. Stay22 sets no cookie: it stores an identifier in your browser’s local storage. The hotel or tour site you land on then sets its own cookie. Both attribute a booking rather than profile your reading here.

There are no social media pixels, no retargeting tags, no heat-mapping or session-recording scripts, and no third-party comment system on this site. You can delete or block cookies through your browser settings; the guides will all still work.

Images and embedded content

Photographs used in the guides are licensed from stock providers and served from this site’s own domain, so viewing them does not expose you to a third-party image host. Where a guide embeds content from another site — a map or a video, for instance — that embed behaves exactly as if you had visited the other site directly, and that provider’s own privacy policy applies to it.

Who your data is shared with

We do not sell, rent or trade personal information. It is shared only with the service providers that make the site work: DreamHost for hosting, Google for analytics and (once live) advertising, Stay22 and the booking platforms it refers to for the affiliate links described above, and the email provider that delivers contact-form messages. Each processes data under its own terms and only to provide that service. We may also disclose information where we are legally required to.

These providers operate internationally, so data may be processed outside Australia — including in the United States and the European Union. Where readers are in the EEA or UK, transfers rely on the safeguards those providers have in place, principally Standard Contractual Clauses.

For readers covered by the UK or EU GDPR: contact-form data is processed on the basis of your consent, given when you choose to send the message; server logs are processed on the basis of our legitimate interest in keeping the site secure and functioning; analytics and, in future, advertising cookies are processed on the basis of consent.

Your rights

Under the Australian Privacy Principles you may ask what personal information we hold about you and ask us to correct it if it is wrong. Under the GDPR, readers in the UK and EEA additionally have rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability, objection to processing based on legitimate interests, and withdrawal of consent at any time. California residents have rights of access, deletion and opt-out of sale under the CCPA — noting that we do not sell personal information.

To exercise any of these, write to us through the contact page. In practice, since the only personal information we hold is the content of messages people have sent us, the usual request is simply to delete a piece of correspondence, and we do that on request. We respond within 30 days.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled a privacy matter, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (oaic.gov.au). Readers in the UK may complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office, and readers in the EEA to their national data protection authority.

Children

This site is written for adults planning travel, including adults travelling with children. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has sent us information through the contact form, tell us and we will delete it.

Security

The site is served exclusively over HTTPS, and administrative access is restricted and protected by strong credentials. No system is perfectly secure, but the amount of personal data held here is deliberately minimal — which is itself the most effective protection available.

Changes to this policy

When this policy changes materially — in particular when advertising goes live and the section above moves to present tense — the revision date at the top of the page will be updated. Please check back if you want the current position.

Contact

Privacy questions and requests go through the contact page, addressed to the editor of Melbourne Tourism Guide.

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