Privacy Policy — Batumi Car Hire

Affiliate site, not the rental company

Where your details go between the search box and the keys

This policy is written the way the booking actually works rather than the way privacy policies are usually ordered, because the ordering is the part most people get wrong about an affiliate site. Batumi Hire Car does not own cars. It lists what suppliers in Batumi are offering, around five hundred cars on a normal day, and hands you to the one you pick. Your details follow that handover, and they stop being ours at the moment it happens.

So the first thing worth knowing is not a list of categories. It is the sequence: what exists at each stage, and who is holding it. Everything further down this page is detail hung off these four moments, including your rights, the cookie question, and what changes when the car is driven south towards the Turkish border.

You search

Held by: nobody yet

Dates and a pickup point, nothing else. The grid on this page asks a supplier feed for cars in Batumi and shows what comes back. No name has been typed yet, and the only trace of you is the ordinary request record every web server keeps.
You pick a car

Held by: the booking widget

Choosing a listing opens the booking widget. From that keystroke on, what you type is being collected for the company that owns the car. We are an affiliate site: we introduce you to a supplier working in Georgia, we do not rent you anything ourselves.
The supplier contracts

Held by: the car owner

Name, dates, contact details, driving licence, and a card where that supplier asks for one. The hire agreement is between you and them under Georgian law, and their own privacy notice decides what is kept and for how long.
Afterwards

Held by: them, not us

We may be told that a booking happened so the referral can be attributed to this site. That signal carries no licence scan, no passport page and no card number, because the affiliate arrangement is not built to pass them.

The board itself decides how much data you give up

Privacy on a rental booking is not only a question of policy wording. It is also a question of which listing you choose, because the terms attached to a car decide whether a card, an address or nothing at all has to change hands. This is how the Batumi board looked across the first hundred listings we measured.

roughly two thirds

of the first hundred listings hold nothing at all on your card, so for most bookings here there is no authorisation to give.

about one third

ask for a low deposit instead. That is the moment card details reach a supplier, and the only moment they do.

close to six in ten

include delivery. Taking it means an address of yours travels to the supplier so a driver can find you.

around half

can be cancelled free of charge, and a cancellation leaves its own dated record on their side of the booking.

The feed moves within the day, so read these as the shape of the market rather than a guarantee. The terms printed on the individual car are the ones that bind your booking.

What is held, by whom, and what never arrives

Three places your information can sit, plus the cookie question that cuts across all three.

What this site holds

Request records: IP address, browser string, the pages opened and when. Standard server logging, used to keep the site up and to spot abuse.
Your choices: Language, and whether you accepted non-essential cookies. Stored in your own browser, not in an account.
Anything you email us: If you write to the address at the foot of this page, we hold the message and the address it came from until the matter is closed.

What the supplier holds

Booking identity: Name, dates, phone and email, entered in the widget and received by them.
Driving entitlement: Licence details, and the identity document the counter is required to check in Georgia.
Payment instrument: Only where that listing takes a deposit, and handled on their payment side.
Delivery address: Where you asked for the car to be brought, on the listings that include delivery.

What never reaches us

Card numbers: We operate no payment page and hold no card data of any kind.
Document scans: Licence and passport images are collected by the supplier, at the counter or in their flow.
The signed agreement: The hire contract is theirs. We are not a party to it and never see a copy.

Cookies, and who sets them

Strictly necessary: Session handling and your language. The site cannot work without them and they are not optional.
Booking widget: The search and booking panel sets its own, to carry your dates and selection between steps.
Measurement: Aggregate traffic counts, set only if you accept them, and refusable without losing the search.
Lifespan: Some end when the tab closes, others survive it. The detail sits on the cookie page linked below.

Three sets of rules meet in this city

Batumi is a border town. The Turkish frontier sits at the end of the same coast road and Armenia is a drive inland, so more than one legal order can have a claim on a single journey. Here is which one answers which question.

The Law of Georgia on Personal Data Protection

This is the law that governs the site, because the business sits in Georgia and the cars are hired here. It gives you the right to be told what is held about you, to see it, to have it corrected when it is wrong, to have it deleted or blocked, and to take back a consent you gave earlier. A consent you withdraw stops future processing, it does not undo what was lawfully done before you withdrew it.

The supervisory body is the Personal Data Protection Service of Georgia. You can bring a complaint to it directly, and the route to court stays open either way. Nothing in this policy and nothing in a supplier booking form can sign those rights away.

The GDPR reaches across the Black Sea

Georgia is outside the European Union and outside the European Economic Area, and it does not appear on the European Commission list of countries judged to offer an equivalent level of protection. That does not put your booking out of reach of the GDPR. The site is offered in European languages to travellers living in Europe, which is exactly the situation the regulation was written to catch, so access, correction, erasure, portability and objection apply to what we hold.

What it does mean is that your details are processed in a country without an adequacy decision. The lawful ground for that is the booking you are asking for: a contract cannot be performed in Batumi without the car company in Batumi receiving your name and dates. You can complain to the data protection authority where you live as well as to the Georgian one.

When the car leaves the country

The coast road south out of Batumi ends at Sarpi, on the Turkish border. If you intend to cross it, two things change, and neither of them is in our hands. First, whether the car may cross at all is the decision of the supplier that owns it. The written permission that a crossing requires is paperwork between you and them, arranged before you collect, and some listings simply do not allow it.

Second, the crossing itself is a state process. Georgian and Turkish border and customs authorities take your documents and the vehicle paperwork, and they process them under their own national law for their own purposes. They are not acting for us, we send them nothing, and nothing comes back to this site from the booth. The same holds for a drive north or east towards the Armenian frontier.

Keeping it, securing it, and changing this page

How long anything is kept. We do not publish a fixed number of months here, because quoting one we do not hold ourselves to would be worse than saying nothing. The rule we apply is the ordinary one: server records are kept while they are useful for security and then discarded, an email conversation is kept until the matter it concerns is closed, and a cookie preference lasts as long as the cookie that stores it. Your booking record is a different question with a different answer, and the supplier sets it in their own notice and under Georgian commercial retention rules.

Security. The site is served over an encrypted connection, the booking widget runs over its own, and access to the hosting is limited to the people who maintain it. We reduce risk mostly by not holding much: there is no customer account on this domain, no payment page and no document upload, so the most sensitive categories in a car hire never arrive in the first place.

Children. This is a service for people old enough to hold a driving licence and to sign a hire contract. It is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect their data. If you believe a child has sent us something, write and it will be removed.

Third parties and automated decisions. We do not sell personal data, and there is nothing on this site that makes an automated decision with a legal effect on you. The car grid ranks listings by the supplier feed and by the filters you set, not by any profile of you.

Changes. When this policy changes, the text on this page changes with it. We keep no mailing list, so there is no notification to send, and there is no older version still in force somewhere: whatever is printed here is what applies to you today.

Who to write to. Batumi Hire Car, Reynolds Alley, Batumi 6000, Georgia. By email: [email protected]. Two companion pages carry the rest of the terms: the cookie policy and the terms of use.

Now go and pick a car

You have read what happens to your details. The listings that freeze nothing on a card are the ones that ask least of you, and on this board they are the majority.

Questions this policy gets asked

Both, for different things. Batumi Hire Car is the controller for the browsing you do here: the server logs, the cookie choice, any email you send us. The supplier whose car you book is the controller for the booking itself, because the hire contract is theirs. If a question is about the car, the deposit or the agreement, the supplier is the party who can answer it.

Both can, and they do not conflict in practice. This site is run for a market in Georgia, so the Law of Georgia on Personal Data Protection applies and the Personal Data Protection Service of Georgia is the supervisory body. If you are reading this from the European Union or the United Kingdom, the GDPR reaches us as well, because the site is offered to travellers living there.

Two separate things, neither of them ours. Whether the car may leave Georgia at all is the decision of the supplier that owns it, and the written permission is paperwork between you and them. At the Sarpi crossing itself, the Georgian and Turkish authorities process your documents under their own law and for their own purposes. We receive nothing from either side of that.

No. There is no payment page on this domain. On the Batumi board roughly two thirds of the listings we sampled freeze nothing on a card in the first place, and where the remaining third takes a low deposit, the card is handled by the supplier and their payment provider.

Write to the address at the foot of this page and we will remove what this site holds. For the booking record you need the supplier, because they hold it and they are bound by the hire contract and by Georgian retention rules. If a request is refused, you may complain to the Personal Data Protection Service of Georgia, and if you live in the European Union or the United Kingdom you may also go to your own national authority.