Cookies and tracking

Storage used by our sign-in, booking and preference features

These items are written when you sign in, start filling in a booking request, or ask us not to measure you.

All three are strictly necessary in the ordinary sense of the phrase: one keeps you signed in, one holds work you are in the middle of, and one records a preference you asked us to remember. None of them is used for advertising, and none of them can be read by another site.

Card payments through Stripe

Where card payments are available, the payment form loads Stripe.js and Stripe Elements. Stripe may use cookies such as __stripe_mid, __stripe_sid and m, together with device and request information, to process payments and detect fraud. The cookies used depend on Stripe’s configuration and the payment features you use. Stripe may also use storage for authentication, saved-payment features and measurement of its payment services.

Stripe describes these technologies in its Privacy Center and lists cookies and their duration in its cookie information. Blocking payment-related cookies or scripts can prevent the payment form from working.

How the site is measured without cookies

We do measure traffic. We just do it without putting anything on your device.

• Our own measurement writes no cookie and no browser storage. A visitor is identified by a one-way hash of a secret, the date, the IP address of the request and the browser’s user agent, worked out on our server. The IP address is hashed and discarded, never stored. Because the date is in the hash, the identifier is different tomorrow, which is what stops it following you.
• The session a page view belongs to is worked out on the server too, by grouping that visitor’s events within thirty minutes of each other. An earlier version of this site kept that in browser storage; it was taken out deliberately, because storing it would have been storage on your device for a purpose that is not strictly necessary.
• Our hosting provider’s page-view and page-speed measurement runs on every page. Both scripts load from this domain rather than a third-party one, and neither reads or writes cookies, local storage or session storage.

What is recorded in that measurement, field by field, is listed in the privacy page.

Advertising and optional tracking

The sign-in cookie keeps you signed in. The booking draft and our own measurement preference are written by an action you took on the page in front of you, and one of them is a request not to be measured. Our own measurement puts nothing on your device at all.

Payment-service technologies are described separately above. Optional Google Analytics runs only after you allow it. Declining it does not prevent browsing, signing in, listing a boat or requesting a booking.

For completeness, here is what this site does not have: no Google Tag Manager container, no Meta or advertising pixels, no retargeting, no session recording, no heatmaps, no chat widget, no social sharing widgets, no external fonts, and no maps or images loaded from another company. Our hosting provider’s measurement scripts and Stripe’s payment form are described above.

Optional Google Analytics

Google Analytics helps us understand visits to public pages. Its script is blocked until you allow it, and we do not enable it on sign-in, account, dashboard, messaging, admin or payment pages. We send public page addresses without query strings or fragments, page titles and limited referring addresses. Form entries, messages, account identifiers and booking or payment details are not sent to it. Advertising personalization and Google signals are disabled.

Your choice is saved separately in this browser. After consent, Google may set analytics cookies to distinguish visits. You can withdraw consent below. This stops further Google Analytics measurement and removes its analytics cookies; it leaves your sign-in cookie and booking drafts in place. Google describes its processing in How Google uses information from sites or apps that use its services.

Turning things off

• To stop our own measurement, load any page with ?br_optout=1 on the end of the address — for example boatrental.com/?br_optout=1. Reverse it with ?br_optout=0. The setting lives in that browser only, and clearing your browser storage clears it too.
• That switch does not cover our hosting provider’s page-view and page-speed measurement, which is aggregate and stores nothing on your device.
• Your browser can block or clear cookies and site data for boatrental.com. Clearing the sign-in cookie signs you out; clearing site data also removes any saved booking draft.
• Optional Google Analytics stays off when your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control. Our existing measurement does not currently act on those signals; its separate opt-out is described above.

If you are in the EEA or the UK you can also object to our measurement outright, by writing to us. The privacy page sets out that and the rest of your rights.