Tern Software, Inc. (“Tern,” “we,” “us,” “our”) operates a travel platform at tern.travel and through the Tern mobile application (together, the “Platform”). This policy explains what personal information we collect, why, who we share it with, how long we keep it, and what choices you have. It applies to travel advisors, travel agencies, travelers and their travel companions, travel supplier representatives, and visitors to our website. Additional rights apply depending on where you live; see Sections 13 to 16. Capitalized terms not defined here have the meanings in our Terms of Service at tern.travel/terms-of-service.
1. The short version
- We collect what is needed to run a travel business: contact details, trip and booking details, payment details, and the identity documents travel requires.
- We hold information about travelers in two different roles. When Tern sells a hotel stay, we decide how that booking information is used. When a travel advisor or agency uses Tern to run its own business, we hold that information for them and on their instructions. Section 2 explains which is which.
- We use artificial intelligence in the Platform. Section 8 says what it does. No AI feature can approve, decline, limit, suspend or risk-score a person or business without a human being able to review and reverse it.
- We do not sell your personal information. We use advertising tools on our marketing website, which some state laws treat as sharing, and you can opt out (Section 6). With an advisor’s permission, we share its business details and booking activity with travel suppliers and insurance partners (Section 7.10).
- We collect passport details and other identity documents. Section 4 explains why and what we do not do with them.
2. Our role
2.1 Where an advisor or agency runs its business on Tern. A travel advisor or agency uses the Platform to hold client records, plan itineraries, send marketing and book with suppliers it has chosen. For that information, the advisor or agency, or the business it acts for, is the controller (or business), and Tern processes it on their instructions as their service provider or processor, except as Sections 2.2 and 2.3 describe. Their privacy policy governs it. If you want to exercise rights over it, contact your advisor or agency. If you contact us instead, we will tell you who holds the record and pass your request on.
2.2 Where Tern sells the hotel stay. When a traveler books a hotel accommodation that Tern sells as seller and merchant of record, Tern, not the advisor or agency, decides why and how the booking information is used and is a controller (in California, a business) of it. That includes information an advisor or agency gives us to make the booking. This policy governs it, and you can exercise your rights with us directly. Tern’s controller role for this booking does not relieve the advisor or agency of its own responsibility for the processing Section 2.1 describes.
2.3 Where Tern is always a controller. Tern is a controller of information about advisors, agencies and supplier representatives as our own customers and users; account, billing, subscription, payout, incentive credit, points and tax information; the security, fraud-prevention and audit records we keep for our own purposes; and information collected on our marketing website.
3. What we collect
3.1 From travel advisors and agencies. Identity and contact details; account credentials; business details, including agency or host affiliation, business name and address, website, industry credentials and seller of travel registration numbers; tax identification, identity verification and bank or payout details, collected before commission or payouts are paid; commission and fee arrangements; incentive credits and, when Tern’s Points Program is available, points, in each case earned, with balances and redemptions or applications; subscription payment details; and content you create in the Platform, including itineraries, notes, documents, images and messages. If you connect an email account or calendar, see Section 5.
3.2 From travelers and their companions. You may enter some of this directly into a form an advisor or agency builds for its own business and sends you to fill out; where you do, your entry becomes part of the advisor’s record, and Section 2.1 governs who controls it, regardless of entry method. You may also enter information directly when you book a hotel accommodation Tern sells as seller and merchant of record; Section 2.2 governs that information. Otherwise, this reaches us because an advisor or agency enters it on your behalf. If you book for other people, you must have their authority and give them any notice the law requires.
- Identity and contact: name, email, phone, address, date of birth.
- Travel identity documents: passport number, name as shown, date of birth, sex, nationality, place of birth, issuing authority and expiry; driver’s license; Known Traveler and redress numbers; loyalty program numbers.
- Trip: destinations, dates, itineraries, bookings and confirmation numbers, travel insurance details, preferences and budget, companions and relationships.
- Preferences that may reveal more than they appear to: dietary requirements and mobility or accessibility needs. See Section 4.
- Payment: card and billing details used to pay for a booking. Card data is collected and held by our PCI DSS compliant tokenization provider, and Tern holds a token in its place. Card security codes are used only for the payment for which they are collected, are never retained after authorization, and before authorization are retained only where and for as long as applicable payment-network rules and PCI DSS permit, never longer than thirty (30) days.
- Communications: messages with your advisor through the Platform, form responses and support correspondence.
3.3 From travel suppliers. Contact and business details of supplier representatives and information about their offerings.
3.4 Automatically. Device and log information (IP address, device type and identifiers, browser, operating system, error and diagnostic reports); usage information (features used, pages viewed, timestamps). We derive an approximate location, to the level of city or state, from your IP address. We do not collect precise device location. Where you upload a photograph, we may read the location information stored in that photograph’s own metadata, which can be precise, to place it on an itinerary. For cookies and session recording, see Section 6.
3.5 From others. Your advisor or agency; connected accounts you link (Section 5); consortia and industry partners where your agency participates and has opted in; hotel suppliers, wholesalers and booking partners in connection with a booking; our payments provider; support and identity verification providers, including recordings and transcripts of calls with us.
4. Sensitive information
What we hold. Passport and other government identity document numbers and details; financial account and payment information; and dietary and accessibility notes, which can indirectly reveal health or religious information.
Why. Hotels and other travel suppliers often require identity document details to make, confirm or honor a booking, and advisors use them to check that a document is valid for the dates of travel. We collect them where a booking or an advisor’s service needs them. Date of birth is used to price bookings correctly and for check-in. Dietary and accessibility notes exist so that the trip works for you.
What we do with it. We use sensitive information only to provide the travel service and the Platform, and for security and legal compliance. We do not use it to infer characteristics about you, we do not use it for marketing, we do not sell it, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. We disclose it only as Section 7 describes, for example to the hotel that provides a stay. Passport details are held in a separately encrypted field and are also encrypted at rest.
5. Connected accounts
Email and calendar. If you connect a Google or Microsoft mailbox or calendar, we access it, through our integration provider Nylas, to find and organize travel information, such as confirmations, itinerary changes and appointments related to trips, and we request the permissions needed for this. Content from your connected mailbox and calendar is processed by our AI features for that purpose, under the terms Section 8 describes. Tern’s use of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. Nothing elsewhere in this policy, including Sections 7.7, 7.12 and 8, permits a use of information received from Google APIs beyond what those requirements allow.
Bank accounts. If you connect a bank account for reconciliation or payouts, we receive account and transaction information for that purpose only.
Disconnecting. You can disconnect a linked account at any time in settings. That stops future access; it does not by itself delete information already received (see Section 10).
6. Cookies, analytics and session recording
On our marketing website we use cookies and similar technologies for analytics and advertising, including Meta and Google advertising and analytics tools, to measure campaigns and to show our ads to people who have visited us on other sites. Under some state privacy laws, this is “sharing” personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising or “targeted advertising.” You can opt out using the “Your Privacy Choices” link on our website, and we treat a Global Privacy Control signal from your browser as a request to opt out. Advertising technologies appear on the marketing website only. Inside the Platform, essential cookies run the service, keep you signed in and keep it secure. Separate analytics and session-replay tools help us understand how features are used; those tools are not treated as essential merely because they help us improve the service. We do not run advertising technologies inside the Platform.
Session recording. We record and replay sessions in the web application, using FullStory, to diagnose problems and improve usability. A recording captures interactions such as clicks, scrolling and navigation, and what appears on the screen, including traveler and booking details an advisor views and text typed into form fields. Each recording is linked to the advisor’s user ID, name and email. We exclude password fields, hidden form fields, payment card fields and passport images from recordings; mask passport details, travel document fields and bank details; remove query strings and fragments from page addresses; and discard IP addresses after processing. We do not record administrator accounts or payment pages, and we record travelers only where we have enabled recording for them. We also use Sentry for crash reporting and session replay in our mobile apps. You can opt out of FullStory recording at fullstory.com/optout.
Email. Emails we send, and marketing emails advisors and agencies send using the Platform, may contain pixels or similar technologies that tell the sender whether a message was opened or a link was clicked.
Your choices. Browser settings control cookies. Blocking all cookies will stop parts of the Platform working. You can also opt out of Google Analytics using Google’s browser add-on. Where applicable law requires consent for cookies, session replay, pixels or similar technologies, we obtain it before activating them and let you withdraw it through the relevant privacy or cookie controls. Browser settings and a provider’s opt-out page do not replace that consent.
7. Who we share information with
7.1 Hotel suppliers and wholesalers. To make, pay for, confirm, change, cancel and service a hotel booking Tern sells, we share traveler and booking information with the hotel and with the wholesaler or other supplier from which we obtain the room. Some are located outside the traveler’s country. In particular, for hotel inventory supplied through Priceline, we share the travelers’ names, country of passport and gender with Agoda Company Pte. Ltd. in Singapore, which receives them as an independent controller and handles them under its own privacy policy. See Section 16 on international transfers.
7.2 Our payments provider. Payments, payouts and financial features are provided by Airwallex. Airwallex receives payment, transaction, identity verification and business information about travelers, advisors, agencies and payers as an independent controller, and handles it under its own privacy policy, available at airwallex.com/us/terms/privacy-policy-airwallex (United States) and airwallex.com/ca/terms/privacy-policy (Canada).
7.3 Card issuers and payment networks. To process payments and to respond to payment disputes, including by providing the Booking Confirmation, the supplier rules the traveler accepted and other transaction records to the card issuer.
7.4 Your advisor and agency, and where your agency participates, its host agency or consortium, and the agency’s own systems that it asks us to connect, such as back office, marketing and accounting integrations.
7.5 Consortia and industry networks where your agency has opted into sharing.
7.6 Insurance carriers and distributors, where an advisor arranges travel insurance.
7.7 Service providers who operate the Platform on our behalf under contracts that limit their use of the information, except as this paragraph describes: hosting, storage, analytics, error monitoring, session recording, support tooling, communications, email delivery, email and calendar integration (Nylas), identity verification, payment tokenization, and processing of Tern’s own subscription fees (Stripe). FullStory may use information from recorded sessions to improve its own service, and owns de-identified, aggregated usage data derived from it. A small number of our other service providers may use non-identifying or aggregated service data to improve their own products. Information is treated as anonymous or de-identified only once it meets applicable legal standards.
7.8 AI model and infrastructure providers. See Section 8.
7.9 Our corporate affiliates, who handle it consistently with this policy; professional advisers, such as lawyers, auditors and insurers; authorities, in response to lawful process or where necessary to protect rights, safety or property or to establish or defend legal claims; and a buyer or successor in a merger, financing, acquisition or insolvency.
7.10 Travel suppliers and insurance partners, with an advisor’s permission. If an advisor or agency chooses to opt in, we share its business contact details and information about its booking activity through Tern, not including information that identifies travelers, with hotel brands, other travel suppliers and insurance partners, so they can identify, contact and work with the advisors and agencies booking their products. You can withdraw your permission at any time in account settings, and we will stop sharing from that point. We do not share this information without that permission.
7.11 What we do not do. We do not sell personal information, as that term is defined in California and other state privacy laws. A disclosure under Section 7.10 is made only at your affirmative direction; where an exception for consumer-directed disclosures does not apply, we apply any sale or sharing requirements imposed by law before making it. We share personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising only through the marketing website tools described in Section 6, which you can opt out of. We do not use booking information or information held for an advisor or agency to send our own marketing to travelers.
7.12 Aggregated and de-identified information. We also produce aggregated reports about booking activity from de-identified data that cannot identify any advisor, agency, traveler or other individual. We take reasonable measures to ensure that data cannot be associated with an individual or household, maintain it in de-identified form, do not attempt to re-identify it, and require anyone we give it to by contract to do the same.
8. Artificial intelligence
What AI does here. Reading and organizing travel documents and confirmations; extracting details from identity documents so an advisor does not have to type them; drafting and summarizing content at a user’s request; search and recommendations across travel content; and assisting our support team.
Where information goes. AI features run on commercial AI platforms, currently provided by Anthropic, Google and OpenAI, under paid terms (for Google, the paid tier of its Gemini API; for OpenAI, with the sharing of inputs and outputs, and of evaluation and fine-tuning data, disabled at the organization level). Under the terms and settings we use, none of those providers uses the information to train its models. OpenAI keeps abuse-monitoring logs for up to thirty (30) days. Our customer support messaging provider, Intercom, also provides an AI support assistant. Intercom trains and fine-tunes the models behind that assistant on customer data from our workspace only after it has been anonymized to the standard required by applicable law; we have not opted out of that use. The assistant can also remember context from a customer’s earlier conversations to personalize its answers.
Training. Apart from the Intercom use described above, we do not use traveler or advisor personal information to train or fine-tune AI models. We may fine-tune models we host ourselves using de-identified and aggregated information about how the Platform is used, except where our agreement with an agency restricts that use of its data.
Automated decisions. No AI feature at Tern can approve, decline, limit, suspend or risk-score a person or business without a human being able to review and reverse the outcome. Where applicable law gives you a right to human review of a decision with legal or similarly significant effects, we provide meaningful review rather than relying solely on the possibility of later intervention. We also operate rule-based controls that can block a message or place an account under review where we detect abuse or a security risk; if that happens to you, we will tell you, unless the law or our payments provider prevents us, and you can ask us to review it.
9. How we use information
To provide the Platform and the features you enable; to make, pay for, confirm, change, cancel and service bookings, including hotel stays Tern sells, and to report on them to the agency that made the booking; to process payments, prevent fraud and Chargebacks, and respond to payment disputes; to pay commissions and payouts, verify identity and meet tax reporting obligations; to administer Tern’s incentive credits and Points Program, including calculating, crediting, applying, redeeming and expiring them; to keep the ledger; to communicate with you about your account, bookings and transactions; to provide support; for security and to investigate misuse; to improve the Platform, including through analytics and error monitoring; to produce aggregated and de-identified reports; to market our own services to advisors, agencies and suppliers (Section 11); to screen against sanctions lists; and to comply with law and establish or defend legal claims.
10. How long we keep information
Where Section 8 describes a retention period for an AI provider, that period applies in addition to the standard below. We retain personal information, whether held by us or by service providers on our behalf, in each category described in Section 3, including our own records of AI inputs and outputs, for as long as needed for the purposes for which we collected it, described in Section 9, and as required or permitted by applicable law, and then delete or de-identify it. In applying that standard we consider, for each category, whether the account or record it belongs to is still open, whether it is needed to complete or support a booking or transaction, whether a payment dispute, claim or legal proceeding could still arise or is pending, and any period for which tax, accounting, financial or other law requires us to keep it. Records of incentive credits and points earned, applied and expired, and information supporting any tax reporting on them, are kept for as long as a dispute about a balance could arise and for the period tax, accounting and financial law requires. Applied to AI inputs and outputs: a diagnostic log of an AI feature’s operation, kept to monitor and improve the Platform, is handled under that same standard; an AI-generated output we save as part of a trip or client record, such as a drafted description or a summarized itinerary, is kept for as long as that record is, under the same standard. Where information is held for an advisor or agency, they decide how long it is kept while they use the Platform, subject to any period we must observe, and when their use of the Platform ends (which does not include pausing a subscription without closing the account) we return and delete it on the timetable in our Data Processing Addendum. Otherwise, closing an account does not by itself delete its information; see Section 13 to request deletion.
11. Marketing
Our own marketing. We market our services to advisors, agencies and suppliers. You can unsubscribe using the link in any message or in account settings. That does not stop messages about your account, bookings or our terms. We do not send our own marketing to travelers using booking information or information held for an advisor or agency.
Marketing advisors and agencies send using Tern. Advisors and agencies can send marketing to their own contacts using the Platform. The advisor or agency is the sender and is responsible for having a lawful basis and any consent the law of each recipient’s location requires; Tern provides the sending infrastructure as their service provider. Each business keeps its own subscription status for you, and unsubscribing from one business’s messages stops mail from that business only. Use the unsubscribe link in the message.
12. Security
We use technical and organizational measures designed to protect personal information, including encryption in transit, encryption of passport details at rest, access controls, logging, tokenization of payment card data, and deletion of card security codes once a payment is authorized. We and our payment and tokenization providers maintain PCI DSS compliance where required. No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your personal information, we will investigate and notify you and any regulator where the law requires.
13. Your rights
Depending on where you live, you may have the right to know what personal information we hold about you, where we got it, why we have it and who we give it to; to access a copy; to correct it; to delete it; to take it with you in a portable format; to object to or restrict some uses; to opt out of sale, sharing for cross-context behavioral advertising, targeted advertising or profiling with legal or similarly significant effects (Sections 6 and 14 say which of these apply to us); to limit our use of sensitive personal information; and not to be treated differently for exercising any of these.
How to exercise them. Email privacy@tern.travel, or write to the address in Section 19. To opt out of sharing or targeted advertising, use the link described in Section 6; we do not ask you to verify your identity to opt out. Closing your account does not by itself delete information we hold as a controller, so if you want it deleted, ask us; information held for an advisor or agency is deleted as Section 10 describes. We verify your identity in proportion to the sensitivity of the request, and respond within the period the applicable law allows, telling you if we need an extension. When we delete information at your request, we also tell our service providers to delete it, and pass the request on to other recipients where the law requires. If we decline your request, you may appeal by replying to our response or by emailing privacy@tern.travel with “Appeal” in the subject line, and where your state requires it we will tell you how to complain to your attorney general. You may use an authorized agent; we will ask for proof of their authority. If the information is held for an advisor or agency under Section 2.1, for example a traveler record in an agency’s account, we will tell you and pass your request to them, and they are responsible for responding to it as the law requires. Where a California resident has a right to disclosure of specific third parties to whom we disclosed their information, we provide that information as required by law.
14. United States
If you live in a state with a comprehensive privacy law, you have the rights in Section 13 as your state provides them, including the right to appeal a refusal. We do not sell personal information or use it for profiling with legal or similarly significant effects. We process personal information of marketing website visitors for targeted advertising as described in Section 6, and you can opt out. Where state law requires consent to process sensitive data, such as government identification numbers or precise location, we obtain it before processing.
California. We apply the rights in Section 13 to California residents whether or not a California threshold applies to us. For the twelve months before the date at the top of this policy, and using California’s categories, we collected: identifiers (name, email, phone, address, account and device identifiers and IP address); personal information described in California’s customer records law (including passport and other government identification numbers, and payment and financial account information); characteristics of protected classifications (date of birth, and dietary and accessibility notes, which can indirectly reveal health or religious information); commercial information (bookings, itineraries, transactions, payments, and incentive credits and points earned and applied); internet and network activity (usage, logs and the session recordings Section 6 describes); approximate location, and precise location where a photograph you upload carries it in its metadata; audio and visual information (photographs, and recordings and transcripts of calls with us); professional information about advisors, agencies and supplier representatives; and sensitive personal information (government identification numbers, financial account and payment information, and dietary and accessibility notes). Section 3 describes the sources, Section 9 the purposes, and Section 10 how long we keep each category. We disclosed each of these categories for a business purpose to the recipients Section 7 describes. We did not sell personal information. We shared identifiers and internet and network activity of marketing website visitors for cross-context behavioral advertising, as Section 6 describes. We do not knowingly sell or share the personal information of anyone under sixteen (16).
15. Canada
We have users in Canada. Personal information about Canadian users is stored and processed in the United States, and may be accessed by the courts, law enforcement and national security authorities there. We collect, use and disclose personal information with consent, express where the information is sensitive, and you may withdraw consent subject to legal and contractual restrictions and reasonable notice. We send our own commercial electronic messages to Canadian recipients only as Canada’s anti-spam legislation permits, whether by consent or another basis the legislation recognizes, and each of those messages identifies us as the sender and includes an unsubscribe mechanism. Where an advisor or agency sends a message using the Platform, the advisor or agency is the sender and is responsible for the permission that legislation requires (Section 11), and Tern provides the sending infrastructure. The Services are not currently offered to advisors or agencies whose principal place of business is in Quebec, and our financial features are not currently offered to businesses whose registered address or principal place of business is in Quebec. Privacy officer: David Shull, Chief Executive Officer, privacy@tern.travel.
16. Europe, the UK and international transfers
Where the EU or UK GDPR applies:
Legal bases. Performance of a contract with you; our legitimate interests in operating, securing and improving the Platform and marketing to business users; compliance with legal obligations; and consent where we ask for it. For bookings, we rely on contract where processing is necessary to perform a contract with you, on applicable legal obligations where they require processing, or on legitimate interests in arranging and servicing travel where you are not a contracting party and those interests are not overridden by your rights. For account and subscription administration we rely on contract; for security, fraud prevention, service improvement and business marketing we rely on legitimate interests where legally permitted, and on consent where required. A supplier’s request alone does not establish a legal obligation or justify collecting information that is unnecessary. Dietary or accessibility information, which can reveal health or religious belief, is not currently included in the booking data for a booking we sell as merchant of record; an advisor would need to share it with us separately. If an advisor does share it with us for such a booking, we process it only with explicit consent, obtained from each traveler it concerns or from a person with authority to consent for them, before we first use the information for the booking, covering our use of it for the booking and its disclosure to the hotel and to any wholesaler or other supplier through which we book it. Consent may be withdrawn at any time, and we will pass a withdrawal on to those recipients.
Your rights. Access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability, objection, and the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing with legal or similarly significant effects. You may withdraw consent at any time without affecting the lawfulness of earlier processing and complain to your supervisory authority. You may object at any time to direct marketing, including related profiling; we will stop that processing. For processing based on legitimate interests, you may object on grounds relating to your situation.
Information about you that we did not collect from you. Much traveler information reaches us from the advisor, agency or person who made the booking. Section 3 describes the categories and sources. Where Article 14 of the GDPR applies, we provide the required notice within one month after receiving the information, or earlier at our first communication with you or first disclosure if required. An advisor may provide this notice on our behalf, but we remain responsible for ensuring it is given.
Transfers. We process personal information in the United States. Hotel booking information is shared with suppliers in the country of the hotel and, for Priceline inventory, with Agoda Company Pte. Ltd. in Singapore. Where we transfer information out of the EEA, the UK or Switzerland and the transfer is not covered by an applicable adequacy decision, we use the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses, with the UK International Data Transfer Addendum and the Swiss adaptations where they apply, or another safeguard the law recognizes. You can ask us for a copy of the relevant safeguards at privacy@tern.travel.
Marketing. Consent to electronic marketing in the EU and UK is governed by the ePrivacy rules, which are narrower than the bases above. We do not treat a consent basis recorded in the Platform as establishing that a message to an EU or UK recipient is lawful.
17. Children
The Platform is not directed to children and accounts are for adults. We do not knowingly collect personal information directly from a child under 13. Advisors may enter information about a child to plan family travel; the advisor is responsible for having the authority to do so, and we use it only to provide the travel service. If you believe we hold information about a child that should not be there, contact us and we will remove it.
18. Changes to this policy
We may update this policy. If we make a material change we will notify you before it takes effect, by email or through the Platform, and where the law requires consent to a new use of information we already hold, we obtain that consent before the new use begins. Posting a revised policy does not by itself provide that consent or override a data processing agreement. The date at the top shows when this version took effect.
19. Contact
Tern Software, Inc., Attn: Privacy, 1111B S Governors Ave #6194, Dover, Delaware 19904. privacy@tern.travel. Privacy contact: David Shull. For information held on behalf of an advisor or agency, see Section 2.1.