Privacy Policy

What a search leaves with us

Almost everything a search here handles is about the trip, not about you. It processes the pickup point you select, whether Fontanarossa airport or an address in Catania, the dates and times, the driver age you set, and any filter you switch on, such as an automatic gearbox or a debit card supplier. Those details go to LocalRent, the booking platform behind the results, which returns live prices. Your last four result sets stay in your browser's local storage for five minutes so that stepping back is instant; that cache never leaves your device.

Writing to us adds more: an enquiry gives us your name, email address and message, and a review adds the first name and home town you sign it with. No account is created, and no profile of you builds up over time.

Payment details never reach us

Payment is the supplier's business, not ours. The card that pays for the hire and carries the deposit hold, your licence and the passport shown at the desk are collected by the rental company, on its own booking screen or at Fontanarossa. We hold no copy of any of them, so we cannot refund a charge or release a hold; those questions go to the supplier named on your voucher.

Server logs and measurement

Like any web server, ours keeps a request log: for each page served it notes the requesting IP address, the browser's self-description, the path and the timestamp. From those logs we count visits as totals, enough to see which guides are read. No third party analytics script is loaded on cataniacarrental.com at the time of writing. If one is ever added, the Cookie Policy is updated first and it runs only with your consent.

See the Cookie Policy

The lawful basis for each use

Passing your search and enquiry to the supplier you selected happens at your request, as a step towards the rental contract you may sign with it. Keeping the site running, keeping the forms free of automated abuse and reading aggregate figures rest on our legitimate interest in operating a working service, balanced against your privacy. Any optional cookie would rest on consent, which you can withdraw as easily as you gave it.

Your rights under the GDPR

Because the controller sits in an EU member state, these rights are yours wherever you read from:

• Access: confirmation of whether we process data about you, and a copy of it
• Rectification: an inaccurate detail corrected, an incomplete one completed
• Erasure: your data deleted once there is no longer a reason to hold it
• Restriction: processing frozen while a disagreement about it is resolved
• Portability: the data you gave us returned in a common machine readable format
• Objection: a stop to any processing we base on legitimate interest
• Withdrawal: a consent taken back, without affecting what was lawful before
• Complaint: the matter raised with a supervisory authority, with or without contacting us first

Email [email protected] to exercise any of them; the answer comes within a month, free, though we may first ask you to prove your identity. The Italian supervisory authority is the Garante per la protezione dei dati personali in Rome; if you live or work in another EU country, you may complain to the authority there instead.

Who else receives it

Three kinds of organisation see your data: the rental company you picked, which needs your details to reserve the car; LocalRent, which runs the search and the reservation window as our processor, under contract and on our instructions; and infrastructure, the host that serves the site and the mail service that carries our correspondence. Beyond those, only a public authority with a legal right to ask receives anything.

Providers sit inside the European Economic Area where a suitable one exists; for any beyond it, the data moves under a European Commission adequacy decision or standard contractual clauses.

Retention

Search parameters are not stored against you once the results have been returned. Correspondence is kept while the matter it concerns is open, and for no more than eighteen months afterwards. Request logs are rotated out inside six months. A published review remains until you ask for it to come down.

Younger visitors

Italian law lets a person consent to an online service from fourteen, but no supplier here rents a car to anyone under eighteen and many set the bar higher. The site is not directed at children and we do not knowingly gather anything from one; a parent who tells us a child has submitted a form here can have it deleted.

Changes to this policy

This page is rewritten when the site, a provider behind it or the law changes; the date under the heading identifies the version you are reading, and a substantial change is flagged there for a few months.