Privacy.

Two different people's information passes through Askello: yours, because you have an account, and your guests', because they typed a question. They are treated differently and this page says how.

What we hold about you

Your name, your email address, your password (stored only as a hash we cannot reverse), the places you have added and everything you wrote into your guides. If you subscribe, we hold the identifiers our payment provider gives us so we can tell whether your subscription is active. Card numbers never reach Askello.

What we hold about your guests

The questions they type into your guide and the answers given back. A guest does not create an account, and Askello does not ask them for a name, an email address or a phone number.

How long it is kept

Guest questions and the answers to them are deleted 90 days after the conversation ends. Your account and your guides are kept for as long as you have an account, and go when you delete it.

Who else touches it

Anthropic processes the text of a guest's question, together with your published guide sections, in order to produce an answer; they act as a processor on our instructions and it is not used to train their models. Mixpanel receives product analytics — which events happened, when, an anonymous label for the person, the kind of device and browser used, and an approximate location (city and country) that Mixpanel works out from the IP address and does not keep, on a European Mixpanel project; it never receives a guest's question, an answer, a search term, or your email address. Payments are handled by our payment provider. Our hosting and database run on Render in Frankfurt, inside the EU, and a small number of other services handle file storage, email and error reporting. Every one of them is named on the subprocessors page, with what it touches and where it runs. Nothing is sold to anybody.

If we contacted you and you are not a customer

Askello sometimes writes to short-stay hosts who have not asked us to. When we do, we hold the business contact details we found — a name, a business email address, sometimes a phone number — together with where we found them and when. The source is recorded for every one, because a business contact whose origin nobody can name is one nobody can defend collecting. We rely on legitimate interest for this, we do not buy lists, and we do not sell anything. Every email we send you carries one tiny image, which your mail program fetches from our server when it shows the email's images. From that we record, for that email, when each fetch happened and what fetched it: Gmail's, Yahoo's or Apple's mail servers, Outlook, a mail filter, or a mail app or browser on a device. That tells us roughly whether the email was opened; Apple's servers and mail filters fetch it whether or not anyone reads it. We do not keep your IP address, your device, your browser, where you were or your email address from it: the request is used only to tell those kinds apart, then discarded. Our analytics provider, Mixpanel, receives only that one of our emails was fetched, which kind of email, what fetched it and the email's language, with nothing that identifies you. This record is kept with your contact details and deleted with them: when you object, or a year after our last message, after which all that is left is a count that names nobody. If your mail program does not load images, nothing is recorded. We also write, once, to organisations that publish for hosts, such as publishers, tourist boards and associations, at an address they publish for that purpose. We keep that address, where it was published and the email we sent, so we never write to the same address twice. That email carries the same image, recorded in the same way and deleted a year after we sent it, and its link to our example guide carries a tag naming that email (a number, not your name or address), so we can count how often the example was opened from it; those visits are recorded like any other visit to this site (see Cookies). If you ask us not to write to you, the record of the image is deleted and the tag is taken off every visit we recorded with it; Mixpanel keeps the visits it had already received with the tag's number on them. We keep the address, the email we sent and a note of your request, so that we never write again. If you reply to one of our emails, we keep your reply and our answer for a year from the day it arrived, and the words of your reply are read by our assistants, which run on Anthropic's service as our processor and are not used to train their models, to sort it (interested, a question, not now, asked us to stop, and so on) and to suggest an answer that a person reads, changes and sends, or discards; your address is never shown to them. You can object at any time and we will stop and keep a note of the address so we do not start again: use the do-not-contact page, the unsubscribe link in any message, or just reply and say so.

The sample guide we may have made for you

Before writing to a host we sometimes draft a sample guest guide for them, so the message can show something real instead of describing it. Every fact in it about your place is written only from the listing page we already recorded as our source — your own published words, nothing bought, nothing found anywhere else, and nothing about you as a person. Where your listing left a chapter out, the sample shows a labelled example — a template with the blanks left in, which is not a claim about your place. Its cover is either a photograph from that same listing page, kept for the two weeks the sample exists and deleted with it, or a labelled stock photograph; nothing else is fetched from anywhere. It lives at an unlisted link that only appears in the message we send you: it is not indexed by search engines, not linked from this site, and not shown to anyone else. We record, on our own servers and against your sample, how the page is used: that it was opened and how many times, which chapters were opened, whether its chat was opened, the words of any question typed into it (at most 500 characters), how far down it was read and for how long, and whether its Keep this guide button was pressed and what happened on the screen it leads to. We use that to see whether the sample is useful and to decide whether, and what, to write next (the words of a question are also read by the automated assistants that help us run our outreach, which run on Anthropic's service as our processor); if you start keeping the guide and stop, we write to you at most twice more about it, a day and three days later, instead of any other follow-up. Our analytics provider, Mixpanel, receives the same steps without anything that identifies you or your business, and never the words of a question. Our emails to you carry one tiny image, described in the section above; the page itself sets no cookie beyond the session cookie every page here sets — which names nobody — and keeps no note of your address, your device or where you came from. It deletes itself two weeks after it is made, whether or not you ever open it; the questions typed into its chat are deleted with it, and the rest of the record of how it was used stops naming you then, except for when you first opened it after our first email, which we keep with your contact details. If you ask us not to contact you, or ask us to delete what we hold, the sample, that count, the record of how it was used, the record of whether our emails were opened and any copy of the sample you had not yet kept go at the same moment — you do not have to ask for it separately, and you do not have to have replied to us for any of this to apply.

If you try our example guide

On the example guide at /sample, a question typed into its chat is kept on our own servers for ninety days and then deleted: its words, trimmed and cut to 500 characters, the language of the page and when it was asked. Nothing about who typed it is kept with it: no cookie, no address, no device and no visitor identifier. We read these questions to see what hosts want a guide to answer, and Mixpanel never receives them.

A guide you started but didn't finish

If you start setting up a guide without creating an account, what you typed — your pasted listing text and, if you gave one, your email address — is kept as a draft for one day and then deleted, the whole draft at once. If you pressed Keep this guide on a sample we sent you, the draft instead holds a copy of that sample and the address we wrote to, and is kept and deleted the same way. A small cookie in your browser is what finds your draft again; it is strictly necessary for the thing you started, holds only a random token, and expires with the draft. If you gave an email address, we send at most one reminder about the draft, roughly an hour in, as a continuation of what you began — it carries a one-click unsubscribe, and an address that asked our outreach to stop is never written to at all. Creating the account keeps the draft; walking away deletes it, email and all, with nothing retained.

What you can ask us to do

You can see, correct, export or delete anything we hold about you, and you can ask us to erase a guest's questions sooner than that. Deleting your account deletes your guides and everything in them.

Cookies

Every page here sets one cookie that is strictly necessary: a session cookie holding a random token, which is what stops a form on this site being submitted by somebody else. It carries no name, no address and nothing about what you looked at, and your browser discards it when you close it. One other cookie is not strictly necessary: a signed cookie holding an anonymous visitor identifier and, if you came from a campaign link, which campaign it was. It is how we understand which channels bring people here, it expires after three months, and it is only ever written if you accept it — decline and nothing is written, and anything written earlier is deleted on your next visit. Separately from that cookie, if the link you followed carried campaign tags (the utm_ parameters an advert or a newsletter link adds to our address), we note which campaign it was on the record of that one visit — for every visitor, the same way we note which site sent you — and nothing about it is stored in your browser or joined to your next visit. Your answer itself is remembered in a cookie for a year, which is the only way to honour it without asking again forever. If you pick a language with the switch at the top of the page, a cookie holding only that choice is kept for a year, so the site stops guessing your language from your browser or your country. If you accept, Mixpanel, our analytics provider, also loads its own script on this site: it keeps an anonymous identifier and a short queue of unsent events in your browser's local storage, not a cookie, and records which pages you open (each page's address and the site that sent you there), what you click and scroll, and which forms and fields you use — never what you type. Decline and its script is not loaded; decline after accepting and it stops and clears what it stored. You can change your answer at the end of this section, and a published guide never loads it at all. There are no advertising cookies anywhere on this site. Beyond that session cookie, a published guide sets nothing unless the guest acts: a cookie when they ask a question, so the host can reply to them, and a cookie holding only a language when they choose one. Starting a guide without an account sets one strictly-necessary cookie holding a random token, which is how your own draft finds you again; it expires with the draft, within a day.

Who takes your order

Our order process is conducted by our online reseller Polar. Polar is the Merchant of Record for all our orders. Polar provides all customer service inquiries and handles returns.

The contracting entity is Polar Software, Inc., and their own buyer terms govern the sale: Polar buyer terms.

On your card or bank statement this charge appears as Polar Askello — not as Askello.