Privacy Policy

Information Collected and How It Is Collected

In providing the Service, the Company may acquire the following information:

1. Information provided by Users

• Full name.
• Telephone number.
• Email address.
• Information on accompanying travelers.
• Other information provided through input forms and the like.

2. Information acquired through integration with external services

Where a User has permitted integration with an external service (such as social media), the Company may acquire the following information from that external service:

• User ID on the external service.
• Other information the User has permitted to be disclosed.

3. Information acquired automatically

• Device information.
• Log information.
• Cookies and anonymous IDs.
• Approximate location inferred from your IP address (country and city level; only where you have consented to the analytics cookies described in Article 10. The Company does not collect precise location information such as GPS).

4. Information received as a posting

For text and photographs sent to us through the posting form on this website (a "posting"), the Company receives the following information. Entering a nickname and a country or region is optional. Your text and photographs are published on this website as submitted, so please do not enter information that identifies you or your travel companions, such as your real name, address, telephone number or email address.

• The text of the posting (and any translation generated via the translate button).
• Nickname (optional).
• Country or region (optional).
• Photographs attached to the posting.
• The display language of the site you were viewing when you posted.
• A value derived from your IP address using a cryptographic hash function (the original IP address is not stored).
• A value derived from the text of the posting using a cryptographic hash function (used to detect repeated posting of the same content).

Purposes of Use

The Company uses the information it acquires for the following purposes:

• To provide, operate, maintain, and improve the Service.
• To respond to inquiries and to provide support.
• To respond to acts that violate the Terms of Service or this Policy.
• To give notice of changes to the content of the Service or to the conditions of use.
• To make reservations and arrangements for, and to provide, related services such as travel, dining, and accommodation.
• For purposes incidental to the above.
• To publish postings we receive on this website.
• To machine-translate postings and to display and store the translations.
• To prevent nuisance postings, advertising postings and repeated posting of the same content.

The Company may also use the information for the following purposes:

• Creation of statistical data (in a form that does not identify individuals).
• Advertising delivery and marketing analysis.
• Service improvement and development of new services.

For postings (Article 1(4)), however, the Company does not use them outside this website for advertising delivery or marketing analysis. Where a posting is to be used in a brochure, an advertisement, social media or any medium other than this website, the Company obtains the poster's prior consent, as set out in Article 10, paragraph 3 of the Terms of Use.

User Consent and Suspension of Use

Users may request, by the method prescribed by the Company, that the use of their personal information be suspended or that their use of the Service be suspended.
The Company will respond promptly in accordance with appropriate procedures.

Provision to Third Parties

Except in the following cases, the Company will not provide personal information to third parties without the User's consent:

• Where required by laws and regulations.
• Where necessary to protect the life, body, or property of a person.
• Where responding to a request from a public authority.
• Where provided to a subcontractor within the necessary scope.
• Where incidental to a business succession.

In addition, to the extent necessary to operate the Service, the Company entrusts the handling of personal information to the following external services. Some of these providers are located outside Japan.

• Machine translation: Google LLC (United States) and DeepL SE (Germany). When a reader presses the "translate" button on a posting, only the text of that posting is transmitted. Nicknames, countries, photographs and the hash values listed in Article 1(4) are not transmitted. Note that your own posting may be transmitted as a result of another reader's action.
• Email notification: Resend (United States) and Google LLC (United States). To alert our staff that a new posting has arrived, the nickname, country or region and the opening part of the text are transmitted. The Company's business email is received and stored on Google's services.
• Website operation and data storage: Google LLC (United States and elsewhere). This website, and the text and photographs of postings, are stored on that company's cloud services.

In addition, when you view a page that carries a route map, your browser connects directly to the services of Google LLC (United States and elsewhere) in order to display the map, and in the course of that connection your IP address and information about your browser and device are sent to that company. This is not handling entrusted by the Company to Google; the information is obtained by Google itself. Your name, email address, the contents of enquiries and the contents of postings are not sent.

The European Union is a region recognised as having a personal data protection regime equivalent to that of Japan. Details of the personal data protection regimes in the countries where the above providers are located, and of the measures each provider takes to protect personal data, will be provided on request to the contact point in Article 9.

Disclaimer

Except where the Company has acted intentionally or with gross negligence, the Company is not liable for the acquisition of personal information in the following cases:

• Where the User themselves provided the information to a third party.
• Where the information was provided at an externally linked site.
• Where the information was acquired by an external service.

Disclosure of Personal Information

Where a User requests disclosure of their personal information, the Company will verify the User's identity and respond promptly.
This does not apply where the Company bears no obligation of disclosure under laws and regulations.

Correction, Deletion, and Suspension of Use

Users may request the correction, deletion, or suspension of use of their own personal information.
The Company will respond promptly within a reasonable scope.

For postings, the Company does not hold the poster's name or contact details and therefore cannot carry out normal identity verification when a request is made. If you wish a posting to be taken down or deleted, please contact the point given in Article 9 with details indicating that the posting is yours — such as the date and time it was posted, the nickname used, or part of the text. The Company will check what you provide against its records and respond accordingly. Where the match cannot be confirmed, the request will instead be handled as a report that the posting infringes a third party's rights. Where the Company receives a disclosure request based on law, it will respond within the scope of the information it holds. What the Company stores as the record of a posting is a hash value derived from the IP address — the IP address itself is not stored in its database. IP addresses are, however, recorded for a limited period in the web server access logs, as the log information referred to in Article 1(3).

Security Management

The Company takes appropriate security control measures to prevent the leakage, loss, or alteration of personal information.

Contact Window

For inquiries regarding personal information, please contact us at the following:

Use of Cookies

The Company uses the following cookies in order to remember the display language of this website and to keep you signed in. These are necessary to provide functions you have asked for, and they are not subject to consent.

• genko_lang — remembers the display language you have chosen so that it is used on your next visit. Stored for one year.
• gk_customer — keeps you signed in as a member. Stored for 14 days.
• gk_agency — keeps you signed in to the pages reserved for travel agency partners. Stored for 7 days.
• Cookies beginning with gk_wp_ — keep a password-protected page prepared for you unlocked while you are using it. Deleted when you close your browser.
• gk_consent — where the consent banner is shown, records the choice you made on it so that you are not asked the same question again. Stored for 180 days. Like the cookies above it is a necessary cookie and is not itself subject to consent. If you delete it, you will be asked again on your next visit.

In addition, on pages that carry a route map, the site connects to Google’s services in order to display the map (see Article 4). That connection exists in order to show you the very content you came to see. Any cookies set by Google in connection with the map are not set by the Company.

The Company compiles its own daily count of page views on this website. That count uses no cookies and stores no IP address, no device information and no other information by which an individual could be identified: it records only totals per date, per page and per display language. It therefore does not require your consent, and it takes place whether or not consent is given.

The Company does not use cookies for website analytics without your consent. Should the Company use cookies of that kind, it will ask for your consent through a banner on your first visit, and will load the tool concerned only where you choose “Accept”. The tool it would use for this purpose is Google Analytics 4 (provided by Google LLC and its affiliates), and the information that tool collects is an identifier assigned to your browser, the URLs of the pages you view, the display language, the approximate region inferred from your IP address, the type of your device and browser, and the site you arrived from.

Until you have made a choice, and where you choose “Decline”, the tool is not loaded, no cookie is set, and no data whatsoever is sent to Google. The Company also does not serve advertising on this website, and does not use information obtained through website analytics for advertising delivery, advertising personalisation or retargeting. These uses are disabled by default in every case.

If you choose “Decline”, every function of this website remains available to you exactly as usual.

A choice you have made can be changed again on the banner, and can be withdrawn at any time by deleting this website’s cookies and site data in your browser, or by contacting the point given in Article 9.

Retention, Removal and Deletion of Postings; Reporting Infringement

Postings are intended to remain published on this website, and no fixed publication period applies. The text, photographs, nickname, country or region, any translation generated via the translate button, and the hash values listed in Article 1(4) are retained until the posting is deleted, and are erased at the same time as the posting. Temporary records kept to prevent repeated posting become subject to erasure once 24 hours have passed, and records of translation usage once 7 days have passed.

Photographs are stored after the Company's systems have stripped capture data (Exif information) such as the date, time and location of capture. However, what the photograph actually depicts is published exactly as submitted, so please take care over what appears in the frame.

Photographs are placed in publicly accessible storage under a randomly generated URL that is hard to guess. Hiding a posting alone leaves that URL live; making the photograph itself unavailable requires deleting the photograph or the whole posting. Where a request is made as described in Article 7, the Company will promptly stop publication and, as a rule, delete the posting and its photographs within 30 days.

Once published, a photograph may be cached for up to one year on delivery networks and on readers' devices, as part of the arrangements that make pages load quickly. The Company's deletion also does not reach content that a third party saved or reposted while it was public, or content recorded by search engines. Please bear this in mind when deciding what to post.

If you consider that the text or photographs in a posting infringe your rights — for example your likeness, privacy, copyright or reputation — you may report it even if you are not the poster. Please contact the point given in Article 9 with the URL or location of the posting concerned, the date and time it was posted, the nature of the infringement, and how we can reach you. The Company will acknowledge your report as a rule within 7 days and, having reviewed it, will promptly hide or delete the posting where it judges this necessary.

Changes to This Policy

The Company may change this Policy as necessary.
The amended content takes effect at the time it is posted on the Company's website.