Privacy policy

What this covers

This site (https://boardingareainsider.com/), BoardingArea IQ, the connector for AI assistants at https://boardingareainsider.com/mcp, and the network analytics pages under /tools/. Your conversation with ChatGPT, Claude or another assistant is covered by that assistant’s own privacy policy; the bloggers’ sites we link to have their own.

No accounts, no tracking

There are no accounts and no sign-in for the public; the one thing to sign up for is the Insider waitlist, below. We set no cookies on the public pages and run no analytics or advertising scripts on them. The only cookie is for BoardingArea staff who use the staff workbench: a signed session that expires after 12 hours (or when the signed link that opened it expires, 30 days by default and never more than 90), holding no name or contact details.

What happens to a question

When your assistant uses the connector, it sends us the tool’s arguments (a search, a card name, an airport). We answer them and don’t store them.

Questions asked in Ask (the question box on this site, and the ask_boardingarea tool) are different. We send the question, as typed, to BoardingArea’s answer engine, which answers from the network’s posts. That engine keeps every question it answers and lists it, with its answer, on a public page about two hours later (answer-engine.milepoint.com/api2/seat5a/questions). So don’t type anything personal into Ask. On our side, for each Ask answer we record which posts it cited, with the date and a one-way fingerprint of the question (not the question itself), to credit the bloggers; these records are kept about 13 months.

The Insider waitlist

BoardingArea Insider, a paid membership built on the free answers, isn’t open yet. If you join its waitlist (on the front page or at /insider), we keep: your email address; what you tick, if anything (the cards you hold, the programs you collect, what you’d pay for most); where you signed up (the front page or /insider); when; and whether you’ve confirmed the address. We don’t keep your IP address, your browser or anything else with it.

Why: to tell you when Insider opens, and to build its alerts and answers for the cards and programs people actually hold. BoardingArea staff see the totals (how many signed up, how many ticked each card), never a list of addresses.

What we send: first, one email asking you to confirm the address. Nothing else is sent to an address until it is confirmed; after that, only news of Insider opening. We never sell or share the list. To be removed, write to sean@frequentflyerservices.com from that address, and everything we kept with it is deleted. Sign-ups are counted per IP address like any request (below), with a smaller limit of their own.

Your IP address

To keep the service available to everyone, requests are counted per IP address (60 a minute, 1,000 a day). The count for an address is kept only until its limits reset, at most about a day after its last request, and is used for nothing else. The site runs on Cloudflare, which keeps short-lived request logs (time, path, IP address) under its own policy. The pages load their fonts from Adobe Fonts and Google Fonts, which receive your IP address and the page’s address when they send them.

What we store about the blogs

An index of the network’s public posts from BoardingArea’s own feed; the day’s verified card offers, point values, transfer bonuses and promotions, with the tracker pages they came from; and site statistics about the network’s blogs from Google Analytics and Google Search Console (daily totals, pages and searches per blog, and visits referred by AI assistants), read by BoardingArea’s own service account. The number of people reading the network in the last 30 minutes (Google Analytics Realtime, read every 10 minutes) is kept as the network’s total and each blog’s and page’s share of it, the total for 48 hours. These are statistics about blogs, not data about any visitor. In public we show only ratios, ranks and shares from them, never a blog’s page views, visits, clicks or impressions. Daily page and search figures are kept 35 days; daily totals, AI-assistant referral figures and the weekly history 500 days; everything held for a blog is deleted if its analytics connection is removed.

Staff workbench

BoardingArea staff can see those counts, and ask Google Analytics and Search Console directly, in the staff workbench. It needs the staff key or a signed staff link that expires; its tools aren’t listed to anyone without one. Its answers are held in memory for 15 minutes and not stored beyond that.

Reading other sites

We don’t crawl blogs. Once a day we read a short, reviewed list of public tracker pages (and card issuers’ offer pages) as BoardingAreaContentBot, honouring robots.txt; we keep a fingerprint of each page’s text, the figures it states, and the pages themselves for 14 days (the latest copy of each until it changes). Staff may ask for a single network page to be checked; it is read once and kept 15 minutes.

Changes and contact

If this changes, this page changes and its date with it. Questions: sean@frequentflyerservices.com.