Privacy

Guest pages require no account. Hostels.im stores aggregated first-party usage counters and, when enabled, a short-retention HMAC identifier derived from network/browser metadata so administrators can count unique visits. Raw IP addresses and full user-agent strings are not stored in analytics tables.

The Nearby feature can use browser geolocation only after the visitor grants permission. Coordinates are sent by POST only to the current Hostels.im request to calculate nearby hostels and are not stored in application tables.

Public maps load tiles from the configured map provider. When a map is displayed, the visitor browser connects to that provider and ordinary request metadata such as IP address and user-agent may be received by it. Map tiles are not required for the guest QR essentials.

Owner account email addresses are used for claim verification and secure sign-in. Public business contact addresses associated with hostel listings may also be used to contact hostel operators about their listing, verification or Hostels.im owner features. Outreach messages provide an unsubscribe mechanism, and suppressed addresses are excluded from future outreach. No advertising trackers or email-open tracking pixels are used.