Privacy Policy

MyTripMatch ("we", "us", "our") is committed to protecting your privacy. This Privacy Policy explains what personal data we collect, how we use it, and your rights under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 ("DPDP Act") and applicable Indian law.

1. Information We Collect

1.1 Account Information

• Name and email address (required for account creation)
• Password (stored as a one-way bcrypt hash — we never store or have access to your plain-text password)
• Profile preferences such as avatar colour and language selection
• Your acceptance of these Terms and the date and version of acceptance (for legal compliance)

1.2 Trip Planning Data

• Destinations you search for and itineraries you generate
• Travel dates, traveller count, budget level, and interest categories you select
• Trips you save or bookmark

1.3 Payment and Billing Information

All payments are processed by Razorpay, a licensed Indian payment aggregator. We do not store your card number, UPI ID, net banking credentials, or any payment instrument details on our servers. These are handled directly by Razorpay under PCI-DSS standards. We retain only the Razorpay transaction ID, payment amount, subscription status, and date — the minimum necessary for our financial records and customer support.

This payment history is viewable by you at any time from your account's Billing History page. After a successful payment, we also send a payment receipt to your registered email for your records; if you cancel a subscription, we send a confirmation email stating whether a refund was issued or your access continues until the end of your current billing period.

GST tax invoices. For each payment we issue a GST tax invoice, which you can download from your billing history. The invoice records the details needed by GST law at the time it is issued — your name and email (for agent partners: agency or legal name, address, and GSTIN if provided) — together with the amount, tax and payment ID. Issued invoices are kept unchanged as tax records (see Section 4). Razorpay does not email you separately about these subscriptions; your bank or UPI app may still notify you before each automatic debit, as RBI rules require.

1.4 Agent Partner Information

If you register as a travel agent partner, we additionally collect your agency name, phone number, business location, agency logo, tour package descriptions, pricing, and images you choose to publish on the Platform, any information you submit when applying for blue-tick verification, and your plan status (free plan, Premium trial or Premium).

If you choose to add GST details for your invoices, we also collect your GSTIN, the legal name registered for GST and your principal place of business. Because a GSTIN contains the holder's PAN, it is stored encrypted (AES-256-GCM, with a key kept separately from the database), is never shown in full in the dashboard (only the state code and last three characters), and is used only to print your own tax invoices. You can change or remove it at any time; invoices already issued keep the details they were issued with.

1.4a Information Shared With Agent Partners

Travel agent partners are independent businesses. Your information is shared with an agent partner only in these cases:

• When you message an agent — your name, profile avatar and your messages are visible to that agent
• When you send a trip request ("Get help arranging this trip") — your name, profile avatar and the trip details you chose to share (destinations, dates, travellers, budget and any note) are shared with the relevant agent partners
• When you save (wishlist) a tour package — only with your consent — the package's agent partner is told that it was saved, without any details about you. Your name and email address are shown to them (if they are on Premium, under "Saved Leads") only if you agree. We ask the first time you save a package; your choice applies to all your saved packages and you can change it at any time from your Profile page. If you withdraw consent, your details are removed from agents' Saved Leads straight away

Agent partners may use these details only to respond to your interest in their packages (see our Terms of Service, Section 7). They are not shared with agents in any other situation.

1.5 Trip Buddy — Posts, Likes, Comments and Reports

Our Trip Buddy feature lets you post that you're planning a trip and looking for fellow travellers to join. When you create a Trip Buddy post, the following information is publicly visible to other registered users of the Platform — not just to us: your destination, starting city, travel dates, how many people you're looking for, any description you choose to add, and your name and profile avatar. Please do not include sensitive personal details (such as your phone number, home address, or financial information) in a public post or its comments — share those only through direct message once you've decided you're comfortable doing so, and use your own judgement about what to share with someone you haven't met.

• Likes and pins — recorded per-user; we never publish who liked or pinned a post, or how many people did — only whether you personally liked or pinned something is shown to you
• Comments — publicly visible on the post, attributed to your name and profile
• Blocking another user — recorded privately; the blocked user is not notified, and blocking is one-directional (only affects what you see)
• Reports — when you report a post, the reason, any details you provide, and your identity as the reporter are shared with our moderation team only, never with the person you reported

1.6 Chat Communications

Messages exchanged through our in-app chat — whether between a user and an agent partner, or directly between two users via Trip Buddy — are stored in encrypted form in our database using AES-256 server-side encryption. This is encryption at rest (not end-to-end encryption) — our systems can decrypt messages for customer support, dispute resolution, fraud prevention, and compliance with lawful requests under Indian law. Unlike a Trip Buddy post, direct messages are only ever visible to the two people in the conversation (and our systems as described above) — they are never shown publicly.

1.7 Account Deletion Records

When you delete your account, your profile — including your name, agency details (if applicable), packages, and every other piece of account information — is permanently and completely deleted from our systems. Nothing about your identity is retained or kept in any "scrambled" or partial form.

The one narrow exception, for agent partner accounts only: we retain a one-way cryptographic hash (SHA-256) of your email address, stored in a separate record with no name, no other identifying information, and no link back to your deleted profile. This hash exists solely to detect re-registration abuse — for example, deleting an account and creating a new one solely to claim a fresh free Premium trial. If you re-register with the same email, any remaining trial time is carried over rather than reset; if your trial was already fully used, a new one is not granted (the free plan is always available). A SHA-256 hash cannot be reversed to recover your email address or any other information about you, and this record is retained indefinitely for that single stated purpose only.

1.8 Automatically Collected Information

• IP address (used for security, rate limiting, and fraud prevention)
• Browser type, operating system, and device type
• Pages visited and features used (used in aggregate to improve the Platform)

2. How We Use Your Information

• To create and manage your account and verify your identity via OTP
• To generate AI-powered travel itineraries using Anthropic's Claude AI model
• To process payments, manage recurring subscriptions, and send payment receipts and cancellation confirmations via email
• To connect users with travel agent partners they choose to contact, send trip requests to, or whose packages they save (Section 1.4a)
• To rank tour packages in search results (Premium agent partners' packages are ranked higher)
• To operate Trip Buddy — showing your posts to other users, matching you with fellow travellers, and enabling likes, comments, and direct messages between users who choose to connect
• To review and act on reports of posts or users that may violate our Terms of Service
• To send essential transactional emails (OTP, subscription reminders, trial expiry notices, payment receipts, cancellation confirmations)
• To send marketing emails to users who have not opted out
• To detect and prevent fraud, account abuse, and security threats, including re-registration abuse of free trial periods
• To enforce our Terms of Service and re-registration policy
• To improve our product through anonymised, aggregated usage analysis

3. Third-Party Services We Use

• Anthropic (Claude AI) — your destination and preference data is sent to Anthropic's API to generate trip itineraries
• Razorpay — processes all payments and manages recurring subscription mandates
• Google Places API — provides destination search autocomplete and location data
• Amazon Web Services (Amazon SES) — delivers transactional and marketing emails; receives your email address and the content of the email
• Browser push services (e.g. Google, Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft) — if you turn on notifications, the notification content is delivered to your device through your browser's push service
• Google Fonts — our pages load fonts from Google's servers, which therefore receive your IP address and browser details
• Place and travel information services (OpenWeatherMap, Pexels, Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap and Indian railway data providers) — receive only place names, coordinates, dates or station codes to provide weather, photos, place details and train information; no personal data is sent to them

We do not sell your personal data to any third party. Data shared with the above services is strictly limited to what is necessary for them to perform their specific function.

4. Data Retention

• Active accounts — retained for as long as your account is active
• Deleted accounts — your profile and all personal data are permanently deleted immediately on deletion; payment records and issued GST tax invoices are retained for up to 8 years as required under Indian tax law, and then deleted; for agent accounts, a one-way hash of your email (with no other information attached) is retained indefinitely for free-trial abuse prevention, as described in Section 1.7
• Chat messages — retained for 2 years from the date of the last message in a conversation, then deleted
• Trip Buddy posts — retained for 1 year after the post is closed or its travel date has passed, then automatically deleted; you can delete your own post at any time
• Reports — retained for 2 years for moderation and safety records, even if the underlying post is later deleted
• Marketing emails — opt-out preferences are retained indefinitely to honour your request

5. Your Rights Under the DPDP Act, 2023

You have the right to:

• Access — request a summary of the personal data we hold about you
• Correction — update inaccurate or incomplete data from your Profile page
• Erasure — delete your account from the Profile page (subject to legal retention requirements above)
• Withdraw consent — opt out of marketing emails, or stop sharing your name and email with agents for saved packages, at any time from your Profile page
• Grievance — lodge a complaint with our Grievance Officer (Section 8 below)
• Nominate — nominate another person to exercise your rights on your behalf in the event of your death or incapacity

6. Data Security

We implement the following security measures to protect your data:

• Password security — bcrypt hashing with salt; passwords are never stored in plain text
• Chat encryption — AES-256-GCM encryption at rest for all in-app messages
• Identifier encryption — agent GSTINs are encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM under a separate key and only ever displayed masked
• Data in transit — TLS/HTTPS enforced for all connections; HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) enabled in production
• OTP brute force protection — OTP codes expire after 10 minutes and are invalidated after 5 incorrect attempts
• Rate limiting — API endpoints enforce strict request limits to prevent automated attacks; login is limited to 15 attempts per 15 minutes
• API access control — our backend API is restricted to requests from our official frontend only; direct third-party access is blocked in production
• Injection prevention — all user input is sanitised to prevent NoSQL injection and HTTP parameter pollution attacks
• Security headers — Content Security Policy, X-Frame-Options, X-Content-Type-Options, and Referrer-Policy headers are enforced on all responses
• Token security — authentication tokens expire automatically (user, agent and admin sessions: 7 days)

Despite these measures, no method of internet transmission or storage is 100% secure. We cannot guarantee absolute security. If you discover a security vulnerability, please report it responsibly to privacy@mytripmatch.in.

7. Children's Privacy

MyTripMatch is not directed at individuals under 18 years of age. We do not knowingly collect personal data from minors. If you believe a minor has registered on our Platform, please contact us immediately and we will delete their account.

8. Grievance Officer

In accordance with the DPDP Act, 2023 and the IT Act, 2000, our designated Grievance Officer can be contacted at:

• Email: privacy@mytripmatch.in
• Response time: We acknowledge grievances within 48 hours and resolve them within 30 days

9. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy when our practices change or as required by law. We will notify you of material changes by email and by posting a notice on the Platform. Continued use after the effective date of a change constitutes acceptance of the revised policy.

10. Contact Us

For privacy-related questions, write to us at privacy@mytripmatch.in or support@mytripmatch.in.