Last updated: 21 September 2026
This policy explains what Brussels Tourism Guide (brusselstourism.org) collects when you read the site, why, and what you can do about it. It describes the site as it actually operates today. Where something changes, this page is updated and the date above is changed with it.
Who is responsible
Brussels Tourism Guide is an independently published travel website. It is not connected to visit.brussels, the City of Brussels, STIB-MIVB, or any Belgian public body. Questions about this policy, or requests concerning your data, should go through the contact page.
Reading the site without contacting us
You do not need an account to read anything here, and the site does not ask you to register, subscribe, or identify yourself in order to read a guide.
Like every website, the server records ordinary technical information when a page is requested: your IP address, the time of the request, the page requested, the referring page if there is one, and your browser’s user-agent string. These logs are generated by the hosting provider and are used to keep the site running and to investigate abuse or faults. They are not used to build a profile of you.
Analytics
The site uses Google Analytics 4, connected through the Site Kit by Google plugin, to understand which guides people read and how they arrive. Whether it runs before you have made a choice depends on where you are reading from; see “Your choices” below.
Google Analytics sets cookies and processes a truncated form of your IP address, along with information about your device, browser, approximate location, and the pages you view. Google acts as a data processor for this and may transfer data outside the European Economic Area under its standard contractual clauses. Google’s own explanation of how it handles this data is at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites.
Google Search Console is also connected. It reports aggregate search queries and click data and does not identify individual visitors.
You can prevent Google Analytics from running by switching analytics off in this site’s cookie settings, by installing Google’s opt-out browser add-on, by blocking cookies for this site in your browser’s settings, or by using a browser or extension that blocks analytics scripts.
Advertising
Brussels Tourism Guide does not display advertising at the time of writing, and no ad network runs on it. It carries no paid placements or sponsored posts either. The booking links described in the next section are a separate arrangement, and they are running now.
Display advertising through Google AdSense is intended. Once ads are live, the following applies:
- Google, as a third-party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on this site.
- Google’s use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads based on your visits to this site and other sites on the internet.
- You can opt out of personalised advertising in Google’s Ads Settings, and out of third-party vendors’ use of cookies at optout.aboutads.info.
No advertiser has any influence over what is written here, and nothing on this site is recommended in exchange for payment.
Booking links and commission
Some links on this site earn a commission. Links to hotels, apartments and booking sites are handled by Stay22, a booking-link partner whose script turns them into commission-tracking links as the page loads. If you book after following one, the booking site pays us a commission; the price you pay is the same either way. Every guide says so at the top, and the affiliate disclosure sets out the arrangement in full.
What that means for your data needs spelling out, because it is not what a cookie notice usually describes. Stay22 does not set a cookie. It recognises your device from the characteristics of your browser — fonts, screen, language and similar details — and keeps an identifier in your browser’s local storage under the names visitor_id_id22 and cache_id22, so that a booking made later can be credited here. Like any service your browser connects to, it also receives your IP address and browser details when it loads, and it processes data outside the EU. Blocking third-party cookies does not stop any of this; the cookie settings on this site do.
Stay22 sits in the Advertising group of those settings and does not load at all until that group is allowed. We never see your name, your travel dates or your payment details — what comes back is a count of clicks and, sometimes, the fact that a booking happened. Once you are on a booking site you are under its privacy policy, not this one.
If you use the contact form
The contact page runs a form that collects the name, email address, subject and message you type into it. That information is sent to the site’s email address and is stored on the web server for as long as it takes to deal with your message.
It is used only to reply to you and, where you have sent a correction, to check and fix the article concerned. It is never sold, never added to a marketing list, and never passed to a third party except where the law requires it. There is no newsletter and no mailing list on this site.
Comments
Comments are closed across the whole site, so no comment data — name, email, IP address or comment text — is being collected. Historic comment records have been deleted.
Cookies from the site itself
Beyond the analytics cookies and the booking partner’s browser storage described above, the site sets only functional cookies. One of them, cookie_consent_1305c5, records your answer to the cookie dialog or bar; a companion cookie, cookie_consent_1305c5_loc, remembers for a day which country you are reading from, so the right rules apply without looking it up again. The caching layer (WP Super Cache) may set a cookie to serve you the correct version of a page, and WordPress sets cookies if someone logs in to administer the site. These do not track you across other websites. The cookie policy lists every cookie and every item of browser storage in use, generated from the services actually running here.
Your choices, and what runs before you make them
What runs before you choose depends on where you are reading from, because the law does. In the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom, and in Brazil, Chile, China, Israel, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Thailand, Türkiye and Vietnam, nothing beyond the strictly necessary runs until you answer the dialog on your first visit — not analytics, not Stay22 — and Reject all sits on that first screen next to Accept all, not behind a second click.
In the United States you are shown a bar rather than a dialog, and it is not only a notice: analytics starts on arrival there, but advertising and booking-partner scripts stay switched off until you answer it. In Switzerland you get the dialog too, but analytics starts on arrival there and only advertising and booking-partner scripts wait for your answer. Readers in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Mexico, Argentina, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates get a notice instead: everything described on this page starts when they arrive, the notice says so, and the same control switches it off. Everywhere else, and whenever we cannot tell where you are, the strictest setting applies: nothing beyond the necessary runs until you answer.
Your answer is kept on your own device, in a first-party cookie called cookie_consent_1305c5 that only this site can read, so you are not asked again on every page. An answer lasts up to a year, and a refusal given in the dialog six months, before you are asked again. The Cookie settings link in the footer of every page reopens the choice, and withdrawing is the same two clicks as agreeing: the scripts stop and what they stored on your device is cleared, including visitor_id_id22, cache_id22 and the thumbmark_* keys.
Refusing costs you nothing. Every guide here is readable in full either way, nothing is paywalled, and no part of Brussels Tourism Guide is held back from readers who say no.
If you are reading this in the United States
Several US states give you the right to opt out of the “sale” or “sharing” of personal information, and those words are broader than they sound: letting an advertising or affiliate partner receive information about your visit can count as sharing even though no money changes hands for your data and we have never sold anything of the kind. Rather than argue the definition, Brussels Tourism Guide treats it as covered.
So the bar shown to US readers carries a Do not sell or share button, and for US readers the Cookie settings link at the foot of every page reads Do not sell or share my personal information. The button switches off everything except the strictly necessary — Stay22 and any ad partner included — and clears what Stay22 stored on your device if you had let it run; the link reopens the full choice at any time.
This site also honours Global Privacy Control. If your browser or an extension sends a GPC signal, it is treated as a valid opt-out on arrival — you do not have to find the control and click it as well, and we do not ask again on later visits. Do Not Track is a different and long-abandoned signal, and to be straight about it: this site does not act on DNT, because nothing agreed what it ought to mean.
The record kept of your choice
Proving that a choice was offered and honoured means keeping a record of it. Each answer is logged with the date and time, the two-letter country the choice was made from, which of the rule sets above applied, a reference to the exact wording you were shown, and the choice itself, against a random identifier generated for your browser.
That record contains no name, no email address and no IP address. It holds a salted hash of your browser’s user-agent string, and the salt changes every day, so two visits on different days cannot be linked back together through it. Records are deleted after 26 months. If you want to see or delete the entries tied to your browser, ask through the contact form.
Images and embedded content
Photographs are hosted on this site and compressed locally; they do not call out to third-party image services. Where a guide embeds content from another site — a map or a video, for example — that provider can collect data about you exactly as if you had visited their site directly, and their own privacy policy governs it.
Where a guide embeds something from another site — a map, a video, a post — that embed is held back behind a placeholder until the relevant category is allowed, so it cannot quietly set anything on your device before you have chosen. Clicking the placeholder loads that one item.
How long information is kept
Server access logs are retained by the host for a limited period and then rotated out. Contact form messages are kept while the correspondence is active and deleted once it is closed. Analytics data is retained according to the retention period configured in Google Analytics, which is a maximum of fourteen months. Consent records are deleted after 26 months, and Stay22’s identifier stays in your browser’s storage until you clear it, or until you withdraw consent here, which clears it.
Your rights
If you are in the EU, the UK or Switzerland, the GDPR and the equivalent UK and Swiss law give you the right to ask what personal data is held about you, to have it corrected, to have it erased, to object to its processing, and to receive a copy of it. Requests of that kind can be made through the contact page and are answered within one month.
You also have the right to complain to the data protection authority where you live. If you are in the United States, your rights are described under “If you are reading this in the United States” above.
Children
This site publishes travel advice for adults planning trips, including trips with children, but it is not directed at children and does not knowingly collect information from anyone under sixteen. If you believe a child has sent us information through the contact form, tell us and it will be deleted.
Changes to this policy
When the site’s setup changes — a new analytics tool, ads going live, a consent management platform being introduced — this page is updated to describe the new arrangement, and the date at the top is revised. Material changes are described here rather than made silently.