This document is provided in English. The English version is authoritative and legally binding in the event of any discrepancy.

TripHook Privacy Policy

Last updated: 20 October 2026

1. Who we are (Data Controller)

This service ("TripHook", the "Service", available at triphook.me) is operated by:

POLEMARHI DOO
Vojvode Mišića 46/1, 35250 Paraćin, Republic of Serbia
Company registration number (matični broj / MB): 21688746
Tax identification number (PIB): 112505565
Contact for privacy matters: privacy@triphook.me

POLEMARHI DOO is the data controller responsible for your personal data processed through the Service.

Because POLEMARHI DOO is established in Serbia (outside the EU/EEA) and offers services to individuals in the European Union, we have appointed an EU representative under Article 27 GDPR:

European Representative under Article 27 of GDPR

We have appointed EU Rep as our Representative under Article 27 of the EU General Data Protection Regulation ("GDPR"). All GDPR queries from EU Data Subjects or Data Protection authorities should be submitted to eurep.ie via their dedicated form. BizLegal Ltd trading as EU Rep have their registered office at 27 Cork Road, Midleton Co. Cork, Ireland. Company number 635921.

2. Which laws apply

We process personal data under two regimes that apply to us at the same time:

• the Serbian Law on Personal Data Protection ("Zakon o zaštiti podataka o ličnosti", in force since 21 August 2019, the "LPDP"), because our controller is established in Serbia; and
• the EU General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2016/679, "GDPR"), because we offer the Service to individuals located in the EU/EEA. Under the GDPR, the law follows the data subject, so it applies to EU users regardless of where our company is registered.

Where this policy refers to a right or obligation, it applies under whichever regime gives you the stronger protection.

3. What personal data we collect

We collect only what the Service needs to function. We do not collect identity-verification documents, passport images, passport numbers, or biometric data of any kind.

3.1 Data you provide

3.2 Data collected automatically

We do not run third-party analytics, advertising SDKs, or error-tracking services that capture your personal data. We do use an operational error-monitoring service (Sentry, EU data region) purely to detect and fix technical faults; it is configured to capture errors only, with performance tracing and session replay disabled and personal data (request contents, cookies, IP) scrubbed before transmission.

Your location. If you tap "Locate me", your browser shares your device's position with TripHook for that one action. In search, we find the nearest city on your device and send nothing. When you create a day out, we first look for one of our cities near you on your device; only if none is close, we send an approximate position (about 1 km) to OpenWeather, and to OpenStreetMap if OpenWeather finds no town, to find the nearest town. We do not keep your position.

Analytics. We measure how the site is used with Umami, an analytics tool we run ourselves on servers in the EU. It sets no cookies and stores nothing on your device. Umami never stores your IP address: it is combined with your browser's details and a secret that changes every month into a one way code, so visits in the same month can be counted without knowing who made them. From your IP we keep only the approximate location (country, region and city). We record pages visited (without anything after "?" or "#" in the address), the referring site, browser, operating system, device type, screen size and language, and counts of actions such as a search or a dropped hook, with simple labels like the chosen mood, trip length range, whether a hook is public or private, sign up method or share channel. We never send your name, email, messages or trip details to Umami. We keep this data for 13 months, then delete it. We use it on the basis of our legitimate interest in understanding which parts of the site are used so we can improve them (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). If your browser sends Do Not Track, nothing is recorded.

3.3 Special-category (sensitive) data

We do not ask for, require, or intentionally collect special-category personal data as defined in Article 9 GDPR: data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade-union membership, genetic or biometric data, health, sex life, or sexual orientation. Our interest tags are a fixed set of seven plain categories: music, food and drink, sport and hobbies, city life, nature and outdoors, museums and galleries, and other. None of them is sensitive. "Other" is a plain label with no meaning of its own: it is not used to rank or match you, and the only thing that gives it meaning is what you choose to write under it. Interest notes are free text you write yourself under any tag, including "Other", and are shown on your profile to travellers who can see it, so please do not include sensitive details such as your health, religion, political views or sexual orientation. The words you may add under a tag (interest notes) are free text you write yourself, shown only on your profile and never used to rank, match or analyse you; the request at the end of this paragraph applies to them. We do not run any automated analysis over your free-text bio or messages to infer sensitive characteristics, and we do not use any such characteristic to rank or match you. Please do not enter special-category data into free-text fields; if you choose to include such information voluntarily, we process it only as part of the general text you provide, never to infer or act on a sensitive attribute.

4. How we use your data and our legal basis

A note on the marketplace: travellers (individual users) and providers/bidders (typically businesses) are processed for related but distinct purposes; where a bidder acts as a business, the contract basis applies to that relationship.

Protection against abuse

To protect TripHook against abuse, such as too many requests in a short time, we briefly process your IP address. We store it only in scrambled form and delete it within one hour.

Automated personalisation

We use the interests, mood, budget, and activity you provide to personalise and rank the destinations, events, and travel-companion suggestions we show you. This processing is automated, but it produces only ranked suggestions and has no legal or similarly significant effect on you within the meaning of Article 22 GDPR. It is not solely automated decision-making that grants a right to human review. You can change your interests at any time, or switch to neutral, unranked results. Our legal basis is our legitimate interest in providing a relevant discovery service (Art. 6(1)(f)); where personalisation draws on preferences saved to your account, it also supports our contract with you (Art. 6(1)(b)).

Your profile and other travellers

Before agreeing to travel with someone, a traveller can see the profile you have chosen to
fill in: your display name, your photos (your main photo, and up to three more that only
travellers who can see your profile are shown), languages, home city, interests and the words
you add under them, trip mood, travel style, any links to your own social profiles or website,
the number of trips you have taken and your rating. A link is shown as a plain link that opens
in a new tab; we never load anything from that site, and the link is sent without a referrer,
so the site is not told which page of ours you were on. Who can see it is set out in the table in Section 3.
Showing your profile to a traveller you have already asked to join, or who has asked to join
you, is part of the service you signed up for (companion matching), and we rely on our
contract with you (Art. 6(1)(b)). Showing it to a signed-in traveller who is only considering
your open trip goes one step further: we rely on the same contract, because posting an open
trip is an invitation to be considered, and on our legitimate interest and theirs in an
informed decision before contact (Art. 6(1)(f)). Concretely: for as long as you host an open
trip, any signed-in traveller who could ask to join it can see your profile, whether or not
they have opened that trip. You can object to that second case at any time by posting your
trip privately, in which case only people you invite see your profile.

If you are on a trip, you can propose stops for its plan, and vote I'm in or Not for me on stops other members proposed. The host and the trip's other members see what you proposed, but we do not show that it was you. Your vote is stored so we can count it and so you can change or take it back; members see only the totals, and only once at least three members have voted, never who voted which way. The host is told that a stop was proposed, and you are told whether the host added it. If you leave the trip, your open proposals stop showing. If you close your account, your proposals and votes are deleted; a stop the host has already added to the plan stays part of the host's plan. Your proposals and votes are included when you download your data. The legal basis is the performance of our contract with you (Art. 6(1)(b)).

Ratings between travellers

After a trip is completed, the people who travelled together can rate each other for 30 days.
A rating is one to five stars and an optional written comment, and it is public and
attributed: the rater's display name, photo, stars and comment appear on the rated
traveller's profile, to every traveller who can see that profile (Section 3). The rater sees
this before writing, and a rating cannot be changed or deleted by the rater once it is sent.

Our legal basis for showing ratings you have received is our legitimate interest, and that of
other travellers, in an honest picture of who they would be travelling with (Art. 6(1)(f)). We
do not rely on your consent, because a reputation system that each person could switch off
would not be one. Balanced against that interest, you have a direct way to object: on your
own profile you can hide the written comment of any rating you received, at any time, and
show it again later if you change your mind. Hiding is your exercise of the right to object
under Article 21, applied to the part of a rating that carries another person's words about
you. The stars are not hidden by an objection, because the star average is the aggregate
signal the system exists to provide and a single hidden star would make the average untrue;
if you believe a rating is abusive or false, contact us at privacy@triphook.me and we will
look into it. The person who wrote the comment is not told whether you have hidden it.

If the person who rated you later deletes their account, the rating stays on your profile
with its stars and its comment, and it is shown as coming from a former member with no name
or photo. If you delete your account, ratings you received are no longer shown to anyone; the
rows themselves are kept, linked only to the anonymised account record, because each is also
the rater's own statement (Section 8).

Hooks

You can hook another traveler from their profile. We then notify you in the app, and in your daily email digest if you receive it, each time they post a public trip. We do this to provide the service you asked for (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR). The traveler you hooked is notified the same way that you hooked them. For them, we process the hook on the basis of our legitimate interest in helping travelers find trips from people they want to travel with (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR), and they can turn hooks off at any time in their account settings, which also removes every existing hook on their trips. Nobody else can see who hooked whom or how many hooks anyone has. A hook is deleted 12 months after it was set unless you renew it, and at once when either account is deleted.

Tours

A tour can show a day by day program the host writes, and notices in the app when the host moves a departure you are going on, when a traveller asks the host a question, and when the host replies; these notices are never emailed.

When you say you are going on a departure, the host sees your first name and profile photo so they can plan the tour; nobody else does. Each departure has a group chat, and the host is always in it. If you join it, the others in it see your first name and profile photo and you see theirs; until you join, only the host sees that you are going. When you leave the chat your messages are deleted at once and you are hidden again; 30 days after the departure the whole chat is deleted.

A question you send a host about a tour, and the host's replies, are deleted together once the last message in that conversation is 90 days old.

The host is told in the app when you decline new dates or stop going, and the host and the others in the group chat can open your traveller profile from the list of who is going.

If the host deletes a tour or a departure you were going on, we tell you in the app and keep its title, city and date so it shows in your History.

If a host removes you from a departure, we keep a record of the departure, you and the date so that you cannot join that departure again. It is kept until the departure, the tour or either account is deleted, and it is included in your data export.

Hosting as a Guide or an Agency

You can show that you host as a Guide or as an Agency. If you switch on Guide, we record that you declared it and when, and show the word Guide next to your name on your trips; if you also confirm that you hold a licence for paid guiding, we record that confirmation and when. If you apply as an Agency, we collect your company name, registration number, country, EU VAT number, website, a contact email, licence number if any, the name of a contact person and, if you add it, a document showing your insolvency protection. We check the VAT number with the European Commission's VIES service, which receives only that number, and keep the result. If we reject your application or you withdraw it, we delete the application and the document within 30 days. The document is stored privately; only our staff can open it, through a link that expires after a minute, and each opening is logged. If we approve, the word Agency and a check appear next to your name on your trips. If you close your account, your application and document are deleted and the label is removed.

Reports and blocks

Anyone can report content on TripHook that they believe is illegal, through the report form linked in the footer of every page. Signed in travellers can also report another traveller from their profile or from the rating window after a trip, for example for harassment, a no-show, misrepresentation or a safety concern. A report from the form contains the address of the content, the reasons chosen, an explanation, and, if the reporter chooses to give them, a name and an email address. Such a report contains your account, the traveller you reported, the reason you chose, the trip if it was made about one, and any note you add. We process the reporter's name and email address on the form to comply with our legal obligation to receive and answer reports of illegal content (Art. 6(1)(c) GDPR). We keep everything else in a report, and any messages that are part of it, in order to investigate it, on the basis of our legitimate interest in keeping TripHook safe and handling reports properly, and of the interests of everyone affected (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). A person reviews every report and decides whether the content stays or is removed; no automated means are used to decide. The reporter's name and email address are never shown or sent to the person whose content was reported. Report records include the reporter's details and the messages kept for the report. We delete a report 12 months after we decide on it. If the decision is a removal, restriction or suspension that is still in force, we keep the report until that decision ends, and delete it 12 months after that. If no decision was made, we delete it 12 months after it was filed.

You can block another traveller from their profile or from a trip's crew list. We store who blocked whom and when. We use it to hide the blocked traveller's profile and their earlier messages in your trip chats from you, to stop direct messages between you, and to take either of you off the crew of trips the other hosts, on the basis of our legitimate interest in keeping travellers safe (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). A block is kept until you unblock the traveller, or until either account is deleted. Your data export lists the travellers you blocked, never who blocked you.

Contact messages

If you write to us through the contact form, we process your email address and your message to answer you and to fix what you report, on the basis of our legitimate interest in responding to enquiries (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). Only the operator reads these messages. We delete them 12 months after we have answered or closed them.

Public trip pages and search engines

When you post a trip and choose to make it public, we publish a page for it. Anyone can
view that page without an account, and search engines can list it. The public view of that
page shows the destination, the month of travel, your budget band, your display name, your
profile photo and whether your email is verified. It does not show your rating, your number
of trips, your exact travel dates, your email address, or your contact details.

You choose this. A trip can be posted privately instead, in which case no public page
exists, and you can switch search engine listing for a public trip on or off when you post
it and at any time afterwards.
Our legal basis is your consent for the publication itself, and the performance of our
contract with you for operating the trip once it is posted.

If you host a public trip, you can also switch on Share my plan publicly. Only the host can switch it on, and only for a public trip. While it is on, your plan has its own page that anyone can open. The page shows the trip's city and its days, and each stop's time, name and place, with any listed event it links to. It never shows your name, your crew, your notes, who is going or where anyone is now. The page stops working at once when you switch it off, when the trip becomes private or is removed, or when you close your account. Search engines can list the page only while the switch is on and the plan has stops, and may keep a copy for a while after it is switched off. Because the page shows dates and places, someone who already knows about the trip may be able to tell whose it is. Each time you switch it on, the page gets a new address.

Invite links. Any member of a trip or day out, the host included, can create an invite
link for it and share that link themselves. A private trip has no public page, so the link is
the only way in. Anyone who opens a link, with or without an account, sees the invited view
of the trip: the host's display name, profile photo, whether their email is verified, their
number of trips and rating, and the trip's exact dates. That is the point of an invite, and it
is why the link is yours to share; anyone you forward it to, and anyone they forward it to,
sees the same. Whoever created a link can revoke it at any time from the trip, and the host
can revoke any link on their trip; revoking stops every copy of it working. A member's links
and unanswered email invites are revoked when that member leaves the trip or is removed from
it. The host can see which member's link a person came in through; other members cannot.

Inviting someone by email. A member of a trip or day out can invite people to it by email,
in the member's name.
We send that address one message and never a reminder. We keep a
scrambled form of the address only to stop a second invite to the same trip and to let the
person join the trip they were invited to; we drop it 30 days after they join, decline, or
the invite lapses. If they decline, we also keep a scrambled form for 24 months
so no member can invite that address again. The scrambled form is a keyed hash: it cannot
be read back by anyone without a secret we hold, but it is still personal data and we treat
it as such. We never import anyone's contacts, and an invite is never sent to an address
that has not been typed in by the member sending it.

A day out. A day out is a trip that lasts one day. If you add an event link we read that
page once to fill in the title and date; we do not store the page or its images. When you join a
trip or a day out, your display name is shown to the host and the other members. This is part
of joining (Art. 6(1)(b)). Anyone opening an invite link sees the number going and your name,
unless you switch that off. If you joined or asked to join a trip before 8 October 2026, your name
shows only if you switch it on. The switch is on your crew card once you are in, and the host's
name and the number going are always shown. The day of a public day out is shown on its page, because that
is what the page is for; a visitor with no account sees the host's name and the number going,
and no other names. When you join a day out you can also tell the crew where they will find you
("At the start", "Joining later" or "Leaving early") and leave a short note; both are shown
beside your name to the host and the other members and to nobody else, and both are removed
when you leave or the host removes you.

If you switch off search engine listing for a trip, its page stays open on TripHook and to
anyone with the link, but tells search engines not to list it, and we remove it from the
sitemap we give search engines. We also send the page's address once to IndexNow, a service
used by Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver and Yep, so they recheck the page sooner. Other search
engines, including Google, recheck it on their own schedule. If you switch listing back on,
search engines may list the page again; while the trip is open it returns to the sitemap,
and we send its address to IndexNow once.

If you delete a public trip or your account, its page stops working immediately and
returns a "not found" response, and we remove it from the sitemap we give search engines.
That response is the signal search engines use to drop a page from their results. Apart
from the IndexNow notice described above, we do not submit removal requests to search
engines on your behalf, and we cannot control how
quickly each one acts, so a page may still appear in search results or in a cached copy
for some time afterwards. You can ask a search engine to remove a cached copy directly
using its own removal tools, such as Google's "Remove outdated content" tool.

5. Who we share data with (processors and sub-processors)

We use a small set of service providers ("processors") who process personal data on our
instructions. They are:

Our map basemap is self-hosted (Protomaps), so rendering a map does not transmit your data or IP address to an external map vendor.

Football matches. We show upcoming football matches on destination pages and in city event lists. Our servers load the match dates and teams from football-data.org. We send football-data.org no data about you, and it is not our processor. Football data provided by the Football-Data.org API.

We do not sell your personal data. We may disclose data where required by law or to protect the rights, safety, and security of users and the Service.

Google and Apple. If you choose to sign in with Google or Apple, that company learns that you use TripHook and when you sign in. Each acts under its own privacy policy; neither is our processor. We send them nothing else about you or your trips. Nothing is loaded from Google or Apple on our pages until you press its button.

Sharing contact details with providers

While you are arranging a booking, all communication takes place through the in-app booking chat. We do not give providers your email address or phone number at that stage.

After your trip has ended, we share your email address with the provider you booked with, so they can reach you about invoicing, lost property, or a problem with the booking. We share nothing else. We do not hold a phone number for you and do not share one.

The provider can access your email address for 90 days after the trip end date, after which access ends automatically.

For group bookings, only the organiser's email address is shared. Other members of the group are not disclosed to the provider.

We rely on the performance of your booking contract as our lawful basis for this sharing (Article 6(1)(b) GDPR).

Providers are contractually required to use your email address only for matters relating to that booking, not to send you marketing, and to delete it afterwards. Once a provider receives your email address they become an independent controller of it.

When you message a provider about a booking, our system is designed to remove phone numbers and email addresses before the provider receives them. You should not rely on it to share contact details you intend the provider to see. The only way we share your email address with a provider is the process described above.

Messages between members of a trip crew are not filtered. Anything you write there, including contact details, is visible to the other members.

6. International data transfers

We use providers to run TripHook. We store your data in the EU wherever a provider offers it. Some providers are companies based outside the EU and may process data outside the EU, including in the United States. Every such transfer is covered by the safeguard shown in the table below.

Geographic scope and intended audience

This platform is operated by POLEMARHI DOO from Serbia, with personal data stored in the EU wherever a provider offers it (see Section 6). While the website is accessible globally via the internet, our account features, interactive tools, and marketing activities are intended for residents of the European Union, the United States, and Serbia. We do not intentionally target, market to, or solicit user registrations from individuals residing in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Brazil, or Turkey; we do not offer pounds sterling as a budget currency in our discovery tools and we do not run advertising aimed at those markets. (Independent marketplace providers may quote in their own currency, which we display as supplied.) Any use of the platform by individuals residing outside our primary intended markets is entirely voluntary and on a passive-availability basis. We have appointed a representative in the European Union under Article 27 of the GDPR (see Section 1). We have not appointed representatives in other jurisdictions because we do not target them; if we decide to actively offer services to any such market in future, we will take the steps that market's law requires beforehand.

7. Cookies and similar technologies

TripHook uses only strictly necessary cookies, which need no consent under Art. 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive. We set two kinds:

We set no analytics, advertising or attribution cookies and no third party cookies, so there is no cookie banner. Our search and affiliate click records are linked to an account only when you are signed in; a signed out visit stores no identifier of you, your browser or your device.

8. How long we keep your data

Trip and booking messages. We retain messages exchanged in a trip group chat or booking conversation for 90 days after the trip or booking completes, subject to a maximum of 365 days, after which message content is deleted. We keep messages for this limited period so that (a) we can investigate safety reports and abuse, and (b) a participant can request a copy of their own conversation as evidence within a reasonable window. We are not a party to the arrangement between travellers and providers, or between users and any affiliate, and we do not retain messages to resolve transactional or payment disputes between them. Those are matters between the parties. Our legal basis is the performance of our contract with you in operating the messaging feature (Art. 6(1)(b)) and our legitimate interest in safety, abuse-handling, and providing evidence on request (Art. 6(1)(f)); the limited retention window reflects the storage-limitation principle (Art. 5(1)(e)). Where a safety report, abuse or fraud investigation, or a legal claim is active or reasonably anticipated, the relevant messages may be retained beyond the standard window until it is resolved.

9. Your rights

Under the GDPR and the Serbian LPDP you have the right to: access your data; rectify inaccurate data; erase your data ("right to be forgotten"); restrict or object to processing; data portability (receive your data in a portable format); and withdraw consent at any time where processing is based on consent.

To exercise any right, contact us at privacy@triphook.me. We respond within 30 days.

Erasure and our email provider. When you delete your account, we erase or anonymise your personal data in our systems, on the timescales and with the exceptions set out in Section 8. Some records survive in a form that is no longer tied to you. One residual is worth stating plainly: our email provider (Brevo, Section 5) keeps delivery logs for messages already sent to you, and those logs contain your email address. We have limited that retention to 3 months, after which they are deleted automatically. During that period the logs are used only to operate the sending service (spam prevention and sender-reputation measurement) and to investigate a delivery problem if one is reported. They are not used to contact you, to build a profile, or to make any decision about you. No email provider can delete these logs at the moment an account is erased, because the sending service depends on them.

10. Complaints

If you believe we have mishandled your data, you may lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority:

• In Serbia: the Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection (Poverenik za informacije od javnog značaja i zaštitu podataka o ličnosti), Bulevar kralja Aleksandra 15, 11120 Belgrade, Serbia · +381 11 3408 900 · office@poverenik.rs · www.poverenik.rs. Your right to lodge a complaint is set out in Article 82 of the Serbian Law on Personal Data Protection (Official Gazette of RS No. 87/2018).
• In the EU: you may also lodge a complaint with the supervisory authority of your country of habitual residence, or contact our EU representative (see Section 1).

11. Changes to this policy

From time to time we may change this policy. If we make a material change, we will notify you by updating the "last updated" date above and posting a notice in the app, through the notification surface where you already receive other platform notices.

12. Credits

© openrouteservice by HeiGIT | Data from OpenStreetMap