A demonstration that collects real data
Trip Builder sells nothing. No ticket is issued, no money moves, and the flights are generated rather than real. What is real is the data you type into it: if you fill in the checkout form, a name, a date of birth and a phone number go into a database, and they are as much about you as they would be on any other site.
So this page is written the way it would be for a site that did sell tickets. There are no accounts. Everything the site knows you did is tied to a session cookie in your browser, and to nothing else.
What is recorded when you book
Completing the checkout form writes one row, holding:
- the passenger’s first and last name, date of birth and gender;
- a contact email address and phone number;
- the flights chosen, the fare, and the price;
- the card’s brand and its last four digits;
- the identifier of the browser session that made it.
That last one is what My bookings looks you up by. Clear your cookies and the booking stays in the database, but this site can no longer connect it to you — and neither can you.
Your card number does reach this server
It has to be said plainly, because the opposite is what most sites say. When you submit the checkout form, the card number, the expiry date and the security code are sent to the server. They are checked there.
What is kept is the brand and the last four digits. The number itself, the expiry and the security code are never written to the database and never written to a log. If the form comes back with an error, the page is drawn again with what you typed still in the fields, including the number — that is the browser showing you your own form, not the site storing it.
Nothing is charged, because there is no payment processor here at all. Please do not type a real card number into it.
Nothing is emailed, ever
There is no mailer in this project. No confirmation, no ticket, no receipt and no fare alert will arrive, however long you wait. The contact address you give at checkout is stored and never used. See ticket did not arrive.
The fare-alert list
The subscribe box in the footer stores the address you type and the time you typed it. Nothing else, and nothing is sent to it. There is no unsubscribe link, because there is nothing to unsubscribe from.
What is recorded when you search
Every search adds to a count: the two airports, the dates, the trip type and the cabin, with a running total of how often that combination has been looked for. It is what the footer’s popular routes and most-searched cities are built from.
No identifier is stored beside it. A search cannot be traced back to the browser that ran it.
Google and Yandex, if you let them
Two analytics scripts can load on every page: Google Analytics and Yandex Metrika. Both set their own cookies and both send data to their own companies, under their own policies rather than this one. Neither loads until you have said yes to the notice, and declining is final — there is no second ask and nothing loads in the meantime.
Yandex Metrika is configured here with Webvisor switched on, which records what you do on the page — mouse movement, scrolling, clicks and keystrokes — and replays it. That is more than page counting and it is worth knowing about. The cookies page lists what each one is.
Nothing is deleted
There is no retention schedule. Rows are written and they stay. Cancelling a booking sets it to cancelled and keeps everything in it; the only deletions anywhere in this app are housekeeping on generated flight data.
What this page does not have
A real privacy policy names a company that answers for the data, gives you a way to ask what is held about you, and says how long it is kept. This project has none of those, and inventing them here would be worse than saying so:
- there is no named data controller, and no address to write to;
- there is no route in this app to request, correct or erase your data;
- there is no retention period, because nothing expires.
The practical consequence is simple, and it is the one thing worth taking from this page: treat anything you type into Trip Builder as permanent, and use made-up details.