PRIVACY POLICY

Your privacy is important to us.  We, at Insurance Geeks Limited, trading as travelinsurance.co.nz (TINZ),
take all reasonable steps to ensure that your private information is protected. 


 

 

In this policy, we outline how we collect, use, disclose, hold and protect your personal information. It also deals with how you can complain about a breach of the privacy laws, how you can access the personal information we hold and how to have that information corrected.
 

Our Privacy Policy complies with the Privacy Act 1993 and Information Privacy Principles (IPP).

PERSONAL INFORMATION

Personal information is data that can be used to identify or contact a single person. While some interactions with us, such as getting a quote, can be made anonymously or by using a pseudonym, in order to purchase a travel insurance policy, it is necessary for us to know who you are.  We require certain personal information such as your name, age, contact details, credit card details, travel destinations and in certain circumstances, health information for those covered on your policy.

HOW WE COLLECT PERSONAL INFORMATION 

There are several ways we may collect your personal information.  This includes, completing forms on our website, when you speak to someone in the call centre, during conversations with our claims team, or through associated appointed third party agents such as the emergency assistance team.

For claims and medical assessments, we may collect your details from family members, groups, associations, doctors, medical staff and any other third party that has been instructed by you to deal with us.  We will never collect sensitive information about you without your explicit consent.
 
If you nominate individuals to be covered by your insurance policy, you should direct them to this Privacy Policy and make them aware of the content of any privacy notice we provide you.

HOW WE USE PERSONAL INFORMATION

We will only use your personal information for insurance purposes and to provide you with the best customer care that we can.

Such purposes include verifying your identity, offering you a quote, providing insurance to you, administering your policies, managing claims, and any other purpose which is stated to you at the time of collection or any purpose that you otherwise authorise. We use this data to improve your customer journey and ensure that we can deal with you quickly and efficiently. For example:
 
  1. We may email or SMS you, confirmation of your purchase of insurance, and any other messages or documents relevant to your policy.
     
  2. We will contact you by email, phone or SMS to remind you that your travel insurance quote is still pending if you have requested an insurance quote from us.
     
  3. From time to time, we will use your contact details to send you direct marketing communications including offers, updates and newsletters that are relevant to the services we provide. We always give you the option of electing not to receive these communications in the future. You can unsubscribe by notifying us and we will no longer send these communications to you.

HOW WE SHARE PERSONAL INFORMATION

For policies issued on or after 12 Obtober 2023 we will never sell, trade or rent your personal or health information. We will never give your information to an outside organisation, unless we need to in order to assist in arranging, issuing or managing your insurance.

When you purchase travel insurance from us, information you supply will be supplied to HDI Global Specialty SE - New Zealand (the insurer). The Insurers are required to protect your personal information in accordance with the  Privacy Act 1993 and where health information is involved, the Health Information Privacy Code 1994.

Because of the nature of travel insurance and the destination of your travel, it may be necessary to provide your details to companies located overseas in order to assist you (e.g. emergency assistance providers). By purchasing a policy that includes the possibility of travel outside of New Zealand, you recognise that we or insurers may provide the information to companies located overseas in order to assist you (e.g. emergency assistance providers).

We may also provide your information to others, if we are required to do so by law, you consent to the disclosure or under some unusual other circumstances which the Privacy Act permits.

If you would like more information about HDI Global Specialty SE, (the insurer’s) privacy policy, please visit: https://www.hdi.global/en-au/legal/privacy/

For policies incepted prior to 12 October 2023, the insurer on our travel insurance products was Lloyds of London.
Lloyd’s privacy policy can be found here:

https://assets.lloyds.com/media/2756abc7-b90b-4e49-9b58-1fb7f454ea9c/Lloyd's%20Australia%20Privacy%20Notice.pdf

For policies issued prior to 1 December 2018, our travel insurance policies were underwritten through Arch Insurance. You can access Arch’s privacy policy here.

HOW WE HOLD AND PROTECT PERSONAL INFORMATION

We do our utmost to protect the privacy and security of any personal and health information we hold.

We hold your information in on our computer systems or databases, which may involve storing data on storage or computer systems provided by third party suppliers; in paper records; and/or in telephone recordings.

In some cases, your information may be archived and sent to an external data storage provider for a period of time. We use storage providers located in Australia who are regulated by the Privacy Act and the Australian Privacy Principles, as well as some storage providers located overseas.

We take security seriously and protect your personal information in the following ways:

  1. We use industry standard Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology which encrypts the information you enter via our website. This prevents other computers impersonating your computer and prevents third parties reading or changing your information as it travels over the internet.
     
  2. Our related company offices operate secure data networks protected by industry standard firewalls and have password protection systems.
     
  3. We restrict access to Personal Information to our employees, and contracted third party providers who need to know that information in order to process it for us and who are subject to strict contractual confidentiality obligations.
     
  4. We take appropriate steps to destroy or de-identify personal information if we no longer need it for any authorised purpose and are not required by law to retain it.

COLLECTION OF COMPUTER DATA

We also use technology to collect anonymous information about the use of our website.  This is employed for statistical analysis to identify usage patterns and improve your experience with our website. For example, we use cookies to help us remember information you previously entered. By passing a unique identification between your computer and the TINZ website, we can show you quote information that you have already requested, eliminating the need to re-enter information.

Anonymous data we collect includes, your computer’s IP address, recording the time and pages you visited, the device and browser you are using. Cookies by themselves cannot be used to discover the identity of a user. Cookies may also be used to help us tailor our online ads or to deliver an advertisement to you that may be more relevant to you. You can disable cookies in your web browser but if you do so, some features on this website may not work properly. Cookies are also used to ensure against fraud, misuse.

UPDATING YOUR INFORMATION

Any personal information that you provide to TINZ will be collected and held by Insurance Geeks Limited. You have the right to request access to, or correction of, the information we hold about you by phoning or writing to us using the contact details outlined below. 

Upon receipt of your request and enough information to allow us to identify you, we will disclose to you the personal information we hold about you. We will also correct, amend or delete any personal information that we agree is inaccurate, irrelevant, out of date or incomplete.

COMPLAINTS ABOUT BREACH OF PRIVACY

If you believe your privacy has been breached, or if you have concerns about how we have handled your personal information, please contact our Privacy Officer by emailing .

We will investigate the matters raised and we will respond to you directly. If you are dissatisfied with our response, or with the way that the complaint was handled, then you should refer the matter to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, PO Box 10-094, The Terrace Wellington 6143 or email [email protected]For more information about privacy in general, you can refer to the Privacy Commissioner's web site: privacy.org.nz

CHANGES TO PRIVACY POLICY

Insurance Geeks Limited may update its Privacy Policy from time to time.  When we change the policy in a material way, a notice will be posted on our website along with the updated Privacy Policy. This policy was last updated 12 October 2013.