Cockie Policy – Ceylon Wild Tours

Cookie Policy for Ceylon Wild Tours

This Cookie Policy explains what cookies are, how “Ceylon Wild Tours” (referred to as “we,” “us,” or “our”) uses them on our travel blog, and your choices regarding their use. We are committed to transparency and ensuring you understand how we collect and use data to provide the best possible experience when you explore Sri Lanka with us.

1. What Are Cookies?

Cookies are small text files placed on your computer or mobile device when you visit a website. They are widely used to make websites work efficiently and to provide reporting information. Cookies can be “session” cookies, which are temporary and expire when you close your browser, or “persistent” cookies, which remain on your device for a set period or until you delete them.

Cookies help us recognize your device and remember certain information about your visit, such as your preferences and what content you have viewed.

2. How We Use Cookies

We use cookies for several critical purposes:

Purpose Category	Description
Essential / Strictly Necessary	These cookies are mandatory for the website to function correctly. They enable core functionality, such as keeping you logged into the site or remembering your acceptance of the cookie banner.
Analytics & Performance	We use these cookies to understand how visitors interact with our content, which pages are most popular, and how users navigate the site. This helps us measure the website’s performance and improve the user experience.
Marketing & Affiliate Tracking	These cookies are used to track the effectiveness of our marketing and affiliate partnerships. They allow us to attribute a sale (e.g., a flight booking or tour purchase) back to our site when a user clicks an affiliate link.
Functionality	These remember your choices (such as your display name or region) to provide enhanced, more personal features and a more tailored browsing experience.

3. Specific Cookie Usage

A. Analytics Cookies (Google Analytics)

We utilize Google Analytics to gather essential data on website usage. This information is crucial for optimizing our SEO strategy and content delivery.

Data Collected: Google Analytics records information about the pages a user has seen (e.g., the URL of the page, time of day, and device used). It also collects Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, which are used to determine the general geographical location of users.
Anonymization: The information we collect is typically anonymized and helps us report on visitor interactions.
How They Work: Google Analytics primarily uses first-party cookies to differentiate users and sessions.

B. Affiliate and Advertising Cookies

As a travel blog, “Ceylon Wild Tours” features affiliate programs to monetize content, providing links to third-party services like hotel bookings, flight searches, and tour operators.

Tracking Technologies: We may use cookies and similar tracking technologies (like web beacons and pixels) to access or store information.
Purpose: These third-party cookies track whether a reader clicks on a recommended tour or accommodation link and subsequently makes a purchase. This allows our partners to track the conversion and credit “Ceylon Wild Tours” with the commission.

4. Third-Party Cookies

In addition to our own cookies (First-Party), third parties such as advertisers, travel partners, and social media platforms may place cookies on your device when you visit our website. These are referred to as Third-Party Cookies. We do not control the storage or lifespan of these cookies.

Examples of third-party services that may place cookies include:

Affiliate Networks: To track sales for programs related to booking flights, hotels, and tours.
Social Media: If you use sharing buttons (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, YouTube) to share our content.
Advertisers: For displaying personalized advertisements related to travel products.

5. Your Choices and Managing Cookies

You have the right to decide whether to accept or reject cookies. You can exercise your preferences by managing your choices when you first visit our site via the cookie banner.

You can also control cookies through your web browser settings. Most browsers allow you to:

Refuse All Cookies: You can disable all cookies or delete any individual cookie stored by your browser.
Manage Preferences: You can typically find these settings in the “Options” or “Preferences” menu of your browser (e.g., Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge).

Note: If you choose to disable or refuse cookies, certain parts of the website, particularly personalized features and content, may not function as intended. Disabling affiliate cookies will not prevent affiliate links from appearing on the site, but it may prevent the tracking required for the blogger to receive a commission.

In addition, Google Analytics supports an optional browser add-on that can be installed to disable measurement by Google Analytics for any site you visit.