What the otter keeps, and what it doesn't.

Your search. The destination, dates, party size and the criteria you choose (walkability, a landmark, budget, vibe). Each search gets an id so you can return to its results.

Free text you type in the interview. Sentences like “walkable to Rainey Street under $200 a night” are sent to an AI model to turn them into a change to your spec. We send the sentence and your current spec, nothing else, and the provider's commercial terms do not permit training on our data.

Your profile, if you make one. Signing in is the same 6-digit code. You can add a name, a home city and your usual party, budget shape and vibe so the interview starts from them. All of it is optional and you can delete the account yourself from Settings, which also stops every watch.

Your email, only when you ask for it. If you ask the otter to keep watching a search, we store the email the alerts go to. If you write to us, we keep your message and address in our inbox.

Technical basics. Your IP address and request times, used to pace searches, stop abuse and keep the service up. Your theme choice (light or dark) is kept in your browser's local storage and never leaves it. When you confirm your email with a 6-digit code, a signed cookie remembers that email for 30 days so you aren't asked again; it holds nothing but the address and an expiry.

We don't sell or rent your data. We don't run advertising trackers or third-party analytics. We don't take payment details today; when a paid plan exists, payment will be handled by a payment processor and this page will say which one. We never book anything for you.

A few service providers process data on our behalf, each for one job and none for their own purposes:

• Hosting and database providers in the United States, which hold searches, picks and watches.
• An email delivery service, which sends our emails from otter@stayotter.com.
• Cloud services that fetch live listings. They receive the city, dates and party size of a search, never your email.
• An AI model provider that interprets free text in the interview, under commercial terms that do not permit training on our data.
• Map data from OpenStreetMap, which receives the place or landmark names you type.

Destination photos come from Wikimedia Commons and are served from our site; no request goes to Wikimedia when you browse.

Every pick links to the site where it was found: Booking.com or Vrbo. Clicking through takes you to their site under their privacy policy. Some of those links are affiliate links: if you book, the site may pay us a commission at no cost to you. The commission never affects which picks you see or their order, and we show the other site's price even when it is lower.

Searches and their picks are kept so you and the otter can return to them, and so a watch has a baseline to compare against. Venue counts from the map are cached for 30 days with the time they were observed. Prices are never cached beyond the timestamped record of a search. A watch keeps running until you stop it or it reaches its last check; its log stays with the search. Contact messages stay in our inbox until the matter is closed.

Stop a watch from its page at any time, or from the link in any alert email. To see what we hold about an email address, or to have it deleted, write to us through the contact page and we will do it by hand within a few days. Deleting a watch stops its emails immediately.

Stay Otter is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect their information.

When this page changes, the date at the top changes with it. If a change affects what we do with your email, we will tell watchers by email before it takes effect.

Stay Otter, 5900 Balcones Drive, Suite 34226, Austin, TX 78731. (737) 450-3402. Questions go through the contact page.