Privacy

Rails Midwest is an editorial travel site published by Midwest Land & Transport LLC. We don’t sell anything, take bookings, run accounts, or run advertising. Our hotel links and some other outbound booking links are affiliate links: if you book through them we may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you. From the moment you click such a link, your interaction is with that provider under their privacy policy, not ours.

We collect very little personal data:

• Server logs. Our hosting provider (Vercel) records standard web-server logs — IP address, timestamp, user agent — for a short period for security and troubleshooting, typically up to 30 days.
• Outbound link parameters. When you click a link to an external travel provider, the URL may carry a tracking parameter (such as a UTM tag or an affiliate identifier) so the provider can attribute a resulting booking to us. Booking.com links pass through CJ Affiliate (Commission Junction), which records the click and forwards you to Booking.com. Nothing from CJ loads on our pages; it only happens when you click. From that point your interaction is with that provider under their privacy policy, not ours.

We do notuse cookies for advertising, and we don’t collect email addresses for marketing. For measurement — seeing which pages are useful and which outbound booking links get used — we use Vercel Web Analytics, which is cookieless: it stores nothing on your device, doesn’t identify you, and doesn’t track you across other sites.

With your consent we also load an affiliate script from Travelpayouts, the Stay22 hotel map on city pages, and Google Analytics (IP addresses anonymised, no advertising profiles). Those and any other non-essential cookies load only after you accept them: our cookie banner blocks them for every visitor until you consent, choosing Decline loads nothing, and a browser Global Privacy Control signal is treated as Decline.

Because Google, Travelpayouts, Stay22, CJ, and our host (Vercel) process data on servers in the United States, using the site can involve transferring limited data outside the UK and EU under standard safeguards. If our approach changes, this notice will be updated first.

If you’re in the UK or EU, UK GDPR / EU GDPR give you rights to access, correct, or delete personal data we hold about you, and to lodge a complaint with your data protection authority (in the UK, the ICO). To exercise any of these, email hello@railsmidwest.com.

For any other privacy question, the same address works: hello@railsmidwest.com.