Privacy Policy

This policy explains what Machuca Homes knows about you, how it comes to know it, who else sees it, how long it is kept, and what you can require us to do about it. It covers this website and everything you do through it — searching, messaging, booking, hosting, reviewing.

There is no cookie banner on this site, and that is a decision rather than an oversight. Machuca Homes measures how the site is used because it cannot be run without knowing that, and the honest way to do it is to say plainly what is measured and to give you a working way to refuse — which is in Choosing not to be measured, further down this page, and takes one click. What is not done is advertising, profiling for advertising, or selling anything about you to anybody.

Write to support@machucahomes.com about anything here. Your agreement with Machuca Homes is in the Terms and Conditions; who operates this site is in the Legal Notice.

Your account. Your name, email address and password, and whatever else you choose to add — a photograph, a short description of yourself, a country. Your first name, your photograph, your description, the year you joined and any rating you have earned are shown publicly on your profile page. Your email address, your surname and your password are not.

Your listing, if you host. The address and description of the property, its photographs and video, its prices and rules, and the arrival instructions you write for guests. The exact address is shown only to a guest whose booking has been accepted.

Your bookings. The dates, the number of guests, whether an animal is coming, the message you send the host, the prices agreed and what happened afterwards — accepted, declined, cancelled, refunded.

What you write. Messages between guests and hosts, booking requests, support requests, and reviews.

Payment. Card details are entered on our payment provider’s own form and go straight to them. Machuca Homes never receives or stores your card number. What is kept here is the provider’s reference for the payment, the amount, the currency and whether it succeeded.

Identity documents, if we ask. Machuca Homes may ask you to prove who you are, or that you own a property you are listing. It does not do this routinely, and anything you send for that purpose is used for that purpose and no other.

Machuca Homes measures how people use the site with Matomo, which runs on our own server. There is no Google Analytics, no advertising pixel, no social-network tracker, and no third-party analytics of any kind. The measurement data never leaves our servers and is not shared with anyone.

What is recorded:

• The pages you visit and the order you visit them in.
• Your searches — where, what dates, how many guests, how long, and how many homes came back.
• Which homes you look at, and whether you are looking at them for a short stay or a long one.
• What you do inside a booking: the dates you pick, how far through the steps you get, and when the form stopped you and why.
• Whether you sent a booking request, whether the host accepted it, and its amount.
• Your browser, device, operating system and language.
• Roughly where you are: country, region and usually city.
• How you arrived: a search engine, another site, or a campaign link.

Your IP address

Your address is shortened before it is stored: the last two blocks are set to zero, so 190.113.45.207 is kept as 190.113.0.0. The full address is used only at the moment of the visit, to work out the approximate location above, and is not kept in the measurement records.

When you are signed in, this is linked to you

This is the part worth reading twice. While you are signed in, what you do is recorded against your account, and the identifier your browser carries is stored against your account too — up to 8 of them, so that different devices are recognised as the same person. The result is that your journey can be followed across visits and across devices, and it is not anonymous.

What it is for: understanding how people find Machuca Homes, and how long and how many visits it takes somebody to decide to book. That is the whole purpose. There is no advertising, no advertising profile, no sale of data, and no automated decision that has any legal or similarly significant effect on anyone.

One further use, stated because you would not assume it: where there is a serious concern about a specific account — fraud, abuse, an attempt to work around a suspension — Machuca Homes may look at that account’s own measurement records as part of investigating it. Analytics is not only read as totals.

Every cookie this site sets is its own. None belongs to an advertiser, a social network or a data broker.

Video. Where a home has a video tour, nothing is loaded from the video service until you deliberately press play. If you never press it, that service is never told you were on the page.

Maps and embedded content from other services, where any appear, are subject to those services’ own policies.

You can exclude yourself at any time, with no account and no explanation. It takes effect immediately: the measurement script is not loaded, no measurement cookie is set, no event is sent, and nothing about your visits is recorded — this is not “recorded and then ignored”.

The choice is remembered in a cookie on this browser, so it applies to this browser. Clearing your cookies clears it too. If you are signed in when you make it, it is also remembered against your account and follows you to your other devices.

Global Privacy Control. If your browser sends this signal, Machuca Homes treats it as a refusal and does not measure you — you need do nothing further. (Do Not Track is not honoured: it was discontinued as a standard and its own browser removed it.)

Excluding yourself changes measurement only. Records the platform needs in order to work — your account, your bookings, your payments, your messages, and the security records below — are not affected by it, and there is no version of the site that can operate without them.

If the control above does not work for you, write to support@machucahomes.com and it will be done by hand.

People and businesses can promote Machuca Homes with a referral link, and are paid a commission when somebody they referred books. If you arrive through one of those links, this is what happens, and it happens whether or not you notice the link.

• A cookie records who referred you and lasts 365 days.
• If you create an account in that time, who referred you is recorded permanently against your account. It is set once and is never overwritten by a later referral.
• That person earns a commission if you book.

Affiliates never learn who you are. They see counts and amounts, never the identity of anybody they referred.

You may ask us to remove the referral recorded against your account: write to support@machucahomes.com.

These are kept to prevent fraud, abuse and unauthorised access, and to be able to judge afterwards whether something was handled correctly. They are not measurement and they are not affected by the choice above.

Sign-in addresses. Every sign-in, registration and password reset records the account, the full IP address, the browser and the date. Unlike the measurement records, this address is not shortened — a security record that cannot identify a connection is not a security record. It is deleted if the account is deleted.

Blocked and flagged text. Machuca Homes screens what is written in messages, booking requests, profiles, listings and reviews for phone numbers, email addresses, web addresses and attempts to arrange payment outside the platform. Where a rule stops something, the text as you wrote it is kept, with your account and the date, so that a person can afterwards judge whether the rule was right. This is explained in the Terms and Conditions.

Photographs that are removed. When a photograph you uploaded is deleted or replaced, a small, low-resolution copy is kept, with the account that uploaded it and the date. The reason is narrow and specific: a phone number written across a photograph would otherwise be a way around the screening above, and it only works if the photograph can be swapped afterwards. The copy is never published.

Location data in photographs is removed before anything you upload is stored. Cameras record where a picture was taken; that information is stripped, and the original file is never kept or served.

Other users, and only what they need. A host sees your first name, your profile and the content of your request before deciding. Contact details are exchanged between guest and host once a booking is accepted, so that arrival can be arranged. Reviews you write are published with your first name and photograph. Hosts never see your browsing, your searches or which other homes you looked at.

A host’s team, where there is one. A host may run a listing with other people — a co-host, a property manager — and those people see the same booking information the host sees, limited to the listing they help run and to what their permissions allow. That access ends when their membership of the team ends.

Machuca Homes. People who operate the platform can see what they need to operate it — to answer a support request, decide a dispute, review a listing or a video, judge a deposit claim, or investigate abuse.

Nobody else, except in three cases: the service providers in the next section, who act on our instructions and for no purpose of their own; where the law or a lawful request requires it; and where a business is transferred, in which case the records go with it and this policy continues to apply to them.

Your information is never sold, rented or traded. Not to advertisers, not to data brokers, not to anyone.

Running the platform means using a small number of outside services. Each is given only what it needs for its job.

• Payments. Card payments, refunds, deposit authorizations and payouts are handled by our payment provider, who receives your card details directly and your name and booking amount from us. Machuca Homes never holds your card number.
• Hosting. The website, its database and the measurement server run on servers Machuca Homes rents and controls.
• Email. Notifications are sent from that same server. They are not routed through an outside email delivery or marketing company, so nobody handles them but us and your own email provider.
• Signing in through an external provider. If you sign in through an external identity provider (such as Google), that provider tells us your name, your verified email address and your profile picture — and nothing else. If you sign in with an email address and a password instead, no such provider is involved in your account.
• Anti-robot check when you register. The registration form is protected by reCAPTCHA, a service run by Google, which receives your IP address and how you behaved on the form in order to judge whether you are a person.
• Spam filtering. Text submitted through forms is checked by Akismet, run by Automattic, which receives the submission and the email address and IP address it came from, in order to answer one question: is this spam.
• Video hosting. Where a listing has a video, it is delivered by a video service — which is told nothing about you until you press play.

Some of these operate outside your country, so your information may be processed elsewhere. They are used under their own data-protection commitments, and Machuca Homes does not permit them to use anything received for their own purposes.

Write to support@machucahomes.com for any of this. You will not be charged for it and you do not have to explain why.

A copy of what we hold. The site can produce a complete export of your personal data, including your sign-in address history and the referral recorded against your account.

Correction. Most of it you can change yourself in your account; ask us for the rest.

Deletion, and its honest limits. You may ask for your account to be closed. Closing removes your public presence — your profile, your listings, your name on anything public. It does not erase the record of what happened. Reservations, payments, refunds, deposit decisions and cancellation charges are kept, because they are accounting and legal records and because the other party to each of them has rights in it too. Reviews you wrote stay, without your identity attached. This is set out in the Terms and Conditions.

To stop being measured, at any moment: the control above.

To object, or to complain. You may object to measurement, which is what the control does. If you believe your information has been handled wrongly, write to us first — and you keep the right to complain to the data-protection authority where you live.

Machuca Homes is for adults. You must be at least 18 to hold an account, and the platform is not directed at children and does not knowingly collect anything about them. Children can of course be guests on a stay; what is recorded about them is the number and ages given in the booking, and nothing else. If you believe a child has created an account, write to support@machucahomes.com and it will be removed.

This policy changes when the platform does — that is the point of publishing it with a date. The current version is always the one on this page, and the date at the top is when it was last revised.

Where a change materially alters what is collected or what it is used for, Machuca Homes will say so rather than leave you to notice. Continuing to use the platform after a change means the current version applies to you.