Privacy
Last updated October 30, 2026
The short version
- No account. Your answers and plans are saved only in this browser.
- Your answers describe your body and your needs. We treat them as health data.
- They leave your browser only when you ask, and only with your consent. When you ask for suggestions, a plan or an answer to a follow-up question, your answers are sent to Google’s Gemini service to write it. Step-Free does not keep them.
- We never sell your data, and we never share your access profile with booking sites or partners.
Who runs Step-Free
Step-Free is run by Step-free Accessible Travels. For anything about your data, write to stepfree.travel@gmail.com. Under data protection law, Step-free Accessible Travels is the controller, responsible for how your data is used.
What stays in your browser
Step-Free keeps your trips in your browser’s local storage, on this device only:
| What | Stored as | What it holds |
|---|---|---|
| Your trips | stepfree.v2 | Your answers, your plans, your follow-up questions and the answers, and your saved trips |
| Your consent | stepfree.consent | That you agreed to send your answers to Google, and when |
| Display settings | stepfree.prefs.v2 | Text size, contrast and theme |
| Language | NEXT_LOCALE cookie | Whether you read Step-Free in English or Greek |
No one else can see these, including us. They stay until you delete them: use Start a new trip, delete a trip under Your trips, or clear this site’s data in your browser settings.
On a shared or public device, anyone who opens Step-Free in the same browser can see your saved trips. Delete them when you finish.
What leaves your browser, and why
| When | What is sent | Sent to | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| You press Suggest things to do or Build my access plan, or ask a follow-up question, after ticking the consent box | How you get around, what must be in place, how far you can go and how many steps you can manage, your equipment’s size, weight and battery, your route and dates, who travels with you, your budget, the activities you chose, any notes you wrote, and your follow-up questions | Step-Free’s server, which passes them to Google’s Gemini service | To write your suggestions, plan or answer |
| You type in a city field | The letters you type | Step-Free’s server, which asks OpenStreetMap’s place search (Nominatim) | To suggest matching places. OpenStreetMap sees our server, not you |
| A page loads | A normal web request | Unsplash, for the photographs | Your browser loads the photos directly from Unsplash, which sees your IP address and browser type, as any website does |
| Any time you use Step-Free | A normal web request | Vercel, which hosts Step-Free | Vercel records technical details such as your IP address, the time and the page, for security and to stop abuse |
| A page loads, your suggestions or plan are ready, or you click a link to another site | The page address, the site that sent you here, your browser type, screen size and language, and your approximate location, worked out from your IP address. When your plan is ready: whether it was complete, and the tag of the link that brought you here, such as a forum’s name, if there was one. For a click on a link: only the other site’s name and which part of the plan or page the link was in | Umami, which counts visitors for us, on servers in the European Union | To know how many people use Step-Free and which links help them. Umami uses no cookies and does not store your IP address. It never receives your answers. If your browser asks sites not to track you, you are not counted |
| You click a link to another site | The link itself | The site you open, such as Booking.com, Google or Rome2Rio | The link contains your destination and dates, and some search links contain words such as “wheelchair accessible”. A link marked Partner link also contains Step-Free’s partner code, so the partner can credit a booking to us, and the partner’s site may set its own cookies. Nothing is sent until you click |
| You click a Booking.com link marked Partner link | The link itself | CJ, the network that runs Booking.com’s partner programme, then Booking.com | CJ records the click, so Booking.com can credit a booking to us, and sends you on to Booking.com. CJ may set its own cookies: see CJ’s privacy policy. Nothing is sent until you click |
Step-Free’s own server logs record only how much text the AI produced and any errors. They never contain your answers.
Google Gemini
Step-Free uses Google’s paid Gemini service. Under Google’s terms for the paid service, Google does not use your answers or the plans it writes to improve its products. It keeps them for a limited period, only to detect and prevent misuse. Google may process them outside the European Union, under its own terms for the service. See the Gemini API terms.
Your health data and your consent
Because your answers describe your mobility and health, we only send them to Google with your explicit consent. You give it by ticking the consent box on the last step of the planner; it is never ticked for you. Until you tick it, the buttons that send your answers stay switched off, and our server refuses any request that arrives without it.
Your choice is remembered in this browser only. To withdraw it, untick the box: nothing more is sent until you tick it again. If we change what the box says, we ask you again. Withdrawing consent does not affect plans already written; those are in your browser, and you can delete them.
What we don’t do
- No accounts and no sign-in.
- No advertising and no advertising cookies.
- No tracking cookies, and no tracking across other websites.
- No selling or renting of your data.
- No sharing of your access profile with booking sites or partners.
- No automated decisions about you: the plan is advice for you to check, not a decision about you.
How long data is kept
- In your browser: until you delete it.
- On Step-Free’s server: your answers are not stored. They pass through to Google and are gone when your plan is written.
- Google: for a limited period, only to detect misuse, as above.
- Vercel: technical request logs, for a limited period under Vercel’s own policies.
- Umami: visitor counts, for up to six months.
- Tips: the payment records, for as long as tax law requires us to keep them.
Your rights
You can ask us what data we hold about you, ask us to correct or delete it, or object to how we use it. Because Step-Free doesn’t store your answers, there is usually nothing on our side to send or delete apart from Vercel’s short-lived technical logs and, if you left a tip, its payment record. Write to stepfree.travel@gmail.com.
If you think we have handled your data wrongly, you can complain to the data protection authority in your country.
If you email us
If you write to us, for example to join the travel-agent waitlist, your email and message are kept in our inbox, which Google’s Gmail runs. We use them only to reply and, for the waitlist, to tell you if it launches. We delete them whenever you ask. Please don’t send us anyone’s health details by email.
If you leave a tip
Tips are paid on Ko-fi’s site, not on Step-Free. Ko-fi and the payment service you use there, such as PayPal, or Stripe for cards, handle your payment under their own privacy policies. We see what they show whoever receives a payment: the amount, the name you give, any message you write and, depending on the payment service, your email address. We use these only to keep the records tax law requires and to reply if you wrote to us. A tip is never linked to your plans, which we don’t have.
Children
Step-Free is not designed for children under 16. If you are under 16, ask a parent or guardian to plan with you.
Changes
If this page changes, we update the date at the top. If a change affects how your health data is used, we ask for your consent again before your next plan.
How Step-Free pays for itself is explained in How Step-Free makes money.