Privacy notice.

Plain-language summary

You can ask us for a trip in two ways: a short request form, or a voice note (or typed text) that fills the form in for you to check. Nothing is booked on this website: a travel specialist at The Travel Mine, Navi Mumbai, reviews your request and contacts you to confirm it.

What we collect

• Your trip request: places, dates, travellers, class, hotel wishes, and the optional budget, e-mail and note you type.
• Your name and mobile number, when you send a request.
• Your voice, while you record a voice note. No audio recording is ever stored. Only the text it is turned into is kept, and only if you send the request.
• The text you type to describe your trip, kept only if you send the request.
• Your WhatsApp messages with us, when you write to our WhatsApp number or we message you there (see "WhatsApp" below).
• That you agreed to this notice (the time and the version of the notice shown to you), recorded with each request.
• Technical data needed to run the service: your connection address (used only to protect the service from abuse) and timing measurements. These are not linked to your name.

Where it is processed

Local mode. Without a cloud key, speech recognition and reading your words run on The Travel Mine's own server and no cloud AI provider receives anything.

Cloud mode. When the voice-note page names a speech partner, parts of your request are sent to our AI provider, Sarvam AI:

• the audio of a voice note, so it can be turned into text;
• the text you type or say, so a language model can fill in the request form for you to check.

We may also use AI-assisted tools to suggest which specialist should handle your request; a person always checks it. Before text goes to a model we remove phone numbers, e-mail addresses and names where we can recognise them. This is best effort. The provider handles that data under its own privacy policy. Cloud mode is switched on only after we have confirmed with the provider where it keeps the data and for how long, and this notice then says so. We do not send it your name or number on purpose and we do not store audio.

Staff access to requests is restricted to named accounts and is logged.

Why we collect it

To understand your travel request, to have a Travel Mine specialist contact you with confirmed prices, and to send you the trip updates described below. We do not use your data for advertising and we do not sell it.

WhatsApp

We use the official WhatsApp Business Platform by Meta on our number +91 86572 15721. When you agree to receive updates on WhatsApp, we may send you booking confirmations, document and departure reminders, and arrival, hotel check-in and check-out messages. Trip ideas, offers and feedback requests are sent only if you opted in to them.

If you write to our WhatsApp number, an automated assistant may answer first (for example with a link to our request form), and our team is told about your message. Your messages and ours are stored with your request and anonymised on the same schedule as below.

To stop: reply STOP to any of our WhatsApp messages; this stops all our WhatsApp messages to your number and we will reach you by e-mail or phone instead. Reply START to receive them again. Meta processes these messages under WhatsApp's own terms and privacy policy.

How long we keep it

Requests are kept for up to 90 days and are then automatically anonymised: your name, number, transcript, e-mail, budget and notes, and the text our staff wrote, are removed; only trip details (places, dates, number of travellers) remain for statistics. You can ask us to delete a request earlier at any time.

Your rights (Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023)

You may ask what personal data we hold about you, ask us to correct or delete it, or withdraw your consent. Write to the address below; we respond within 30 days. You also have the right to complain to the Data Protection Board of India.

Contact

Grievance contact: Syed Asif Imam, Proprietor, The Travel Mine, Shop No 5, Plot No 5, Gravity Prime, Sector 5, MIDC Taloja Road, Taloja MIDC, Navi Mumbai, Raigad, Maharashtra 410208, India. E-mail info@thetravelmine.com, phone +91 86572 15721.

Consent

By ticking the consent box on the request form, you confirm that you have read this notice and agree to the processing described above, including the cloud processing described under "Cloud mode" when it is switched on. We record the time you agreed and the version of this notice that was shown to you.