What we collect, and what we don't.

Short version: you can read every guide on this site without giving us anything. If you subscribe, we store your email address and nothing else about you. We never sell anything to anyone, because there is nothing to sell.

If you subscribe

We store your email address, the page you signed up from, the date, and a single random token. That is the whole record. No name, no IP address, no profile.

The token exists so that the confirmation link and the unsubscribe link in our emails work without you logging in to anything, and so that one person's link cannot unsubscribe anyone else. Signup is double opt-in: your address does nothing until you click the link in the confirmation email, so nobody can add you to this list but you.

Every email carries a one-click unsubscribe, and it works immediately. You can also reply and ask us to delete the record; we will, and there is no retention period we are hanging on to it for. We use Resend to deliver the mail, which means your address passes through their systems in order to reach you.

If you click an affiliate link

Some links on this site earn us a commission, and the ones that do say so on the page. When you click one, it passes through our own /go/ redirect first. We log five things: which program it was, which article you clicked from, the country your request came from as Cloudflare reports it, the time, and a one-word guess at whether the click came from a person or from a crawler.

We deliberately do not log your IP address or your browser's user agent, even though both are sitting right there in the request. The only question that log has to answer is which articles send clicks and to whom, and answering it does not require knowing who you are.

That last field is new, and it is worth being exact about how it is produced. To work out whether a click looks automated we read the user agent your browser sends and compare it against a list of known crawler names. Since 10 October 2026 we also read the name of the network the click came from (a home broadband or mobile provider, or a cloud hosting company) and the standard headers a browser adds to say whether a person started the navigation. We keep only the answer: one of likely-human, likely-bot,verified-bot, internal-check (our own link tests) orunknown. None of those inputs is written down. We added it because most of what reaches this site is crawlers, and a click log that cannot tell the difference was telling us nothing useful about readers.

What happens after the redirect is not ours. The merchant or affiliate network sets its own cookies and applies its own privacy policy, exactly as if you had typed their address into your browser. If you would rather not be tracked by them, do not use the link. The same information is in the article either way, and nothing on this site is gated behind a click.

Analytics

We use Cloudflare Web Analytics, and nothing else. It counts page views without cookies and without giving your browser an identifier that follows you between sites or between visits, which is why this site asks you for no consent and shows you no banner. It reports which pages are read, roughly where readers are, and which site or search engine sent them. There is no Google Analytics here, and no advertising or social tracking pixels.

It is a deliberately worse tool at telling a returning reader from a new one. That is the property we want, and it is the reason it needs nothing from you.

What happened, because the history is the point. For nine days, from 4 to 13 September 2026, this site also ran Google Analytics 4, while this page told you it did not. That was a straightforward error in this page, and it was corrected on 13 September. Google Analytics was switched off the same day. The Cloudflare measurement described above was running throughout and was never the problem.

What that means for anyone who read this site between those dates. Google Analytics will have set cookies in your browser and given it an identifier, and it reported pages read, approximate location, and which site or search engine sent you. If you would rather that data did not exist, write to us and we will delete what we can reach.

Your IP address

Cloudflare passes us the address your request came from, and we use it for one thing: rate limiting, so that the signup form and the search box cannot be hammered by a script. It is used as a counter key in the moment and is never written to our database. Cloudflare itself keeps request logs as the operator of the network in front of this site.

Security reports from your browser

This site tells your browser exactly which scripts it is allowed to run. If something on a page breaks that rule (an extension injecting a script, say, or a mistake of ours), your browser may send us a short report. We keep four things from it: which rule was broken, the address of the page with anything after a question mark removed, the website the blocked file came from, and the first few characters of the blocked code. It is written to our server log, not our database, and it carries nothing that identifies you.

What we never do

We do not sell or rent your data, and we do not share your email address with advertisers or affiliate partners. There is no account to create here, so there are no credentials of yours for us to lose. We build no profile of you, with one documented exception: for the nine days described above, Google Analytics held an identifier for your browser. That claim was pulled from this list on 13 September rather than reworded around the problem, and it is back now because the thing that made it false has been switched off. Cloudflare Web Analytics does not reinstate it, because it assigns no identifier in the first place.

Your rights, and how to use them

If you are in the UK, the EU or another place with data protection law, you have the right to ask what we hold about you, to have it corrected, and to have it deleted. In our case the honest answer to the first is usually "an email address and the date you gave it to us". Write to hello@travelsmarterasia.com and we will action it rather than asking you to prove anything elaborate.

Changes to this page

This page describes how the site works today rather than what we might do one day, so it changes when the site changes. Last updated 10 October 2026.