Privacy policy

Who we are

SafarLane is operated by SafarLane. We publish travel guidance and earn a commission when readers book through our links. We are the responsible party for the personal information described below. You can reach us at privacy@safarlane.com.

What we collect

There are no accounts on this site, no login, and no forms. We never ask you for your name, email address, phone number, ID number or payment details, and we could not collect them if we wanted to.

What we do record falls into two categories.

1. Advertising click information

If you arrive from an advert, the advertising platform appends an identifier to the link (Google Ads calls this a gclid). We store that identifier, along with any campaign parameters, in a first-party cookie named sl_attr. It is set for 90 days and is marked HttpOnly, meaning scripts on the page cannot read it.

We use it for one purpose: to work out which adverts lead to real bookings, so we stop paying for adverts that do not. It is not used to build a profile of you and it is not sold.

2. Outbound click records

When you click a link that takes you to Travelstart, we record:

• a randomly generated click identifier
• the advertising identifier described above, where one exists
• which page and which link you clicked
• the destination address
• the page that referred you, and your browser’s user agent string
• the date and time

This is how a commission gets attributed to us. We do not record your IP address against these entries, and there is nothing in them that identifies you by name.

Cookies and analytics

Analytics and advertising cookies are off by default. We use Google Consent Mode, which means Google receives no analytics or advertising cookies from you until you accept in the banner. Decline, and the site works exactly the same — nothing is withheld.

The cookies and storage this site itself uses:

• sl_attr — the advertising identifier described above. Necessary for us to measure advertising, 90 days.
• sl_consent — stored in your browser to remember whether you accepted or declined. Without it we would ask on every visit.
• Google Analytics / Google Ads — only once you accept.

Third parties

When you follow a link to Travelstart, you leave this site. Impact.com, the affiliate network that tracks the referral, will set its own cookies at that point, and Travelstart handles everything that happens afterwards — your search, your booking, your payment and your personal details. We never see any of it. Their privacy policies govern that part of your journey, not ours.

Our click records are stored with Supabase, our database provider. Analytics data, where you have consented, is processed by Google. Both may process data outside South Africa.

How long we keep it

Click records are kept for as long as they are useful for reconciling commissions and measuring advertising — in practice around 24 months — after which they are deleted. The sl_attr cookie expires by itself after 90 days, and you can clear it sooner from your browser at any time.

Your rights

Under the Protection of Personal Information Act you may ask what we hold about you, ask us to correct or delete it, object to how we are using it, or complain to the Information Regulator. Email privacy@safarlane.com and we will respond.

In practice, the honest answer is that we usually cannot connect our records to a named person, because we do not collect anything that identifies you. If you want a specific record removed, the click identifier or the approximate date and time is what we would need to find it.

Children

This site is aimed at adults booking travel. We do not knowingly collect information from children.

Changes

If we change what we collect, we will update this page and the date at the top. Material changes will be reflected in the consent banner as well.

See also our terms of use and how we make money.