BBBOnLine Privacy Seal
TravelInsuranceCenter.com
Statement of
Privacy and Security
Effective Date July 1, 2001


I.  Applicability
II.  Your Privacy
III.  Disclosure of Personally Identifiable Information
    A.  What Can I Do Without Disclosing Any Information?
    B.  Why Do I Need to Submit Personal Information?
    C.  What Kinds of Information Will I Have to Provide?
        1.  Personal Information (Administrative)
        2.  Other Personal Information Required for Coverage
        3.  Health Information
    D.  What Do You Do with this Information?
    E.  Will Any of the Personal Information Collected be Disclosed to Outside Parties?
    F.  How Do I Remove My Information from Your Database?
    G.  How Do I Edit or Update the Information in My Personal Profile?
IV.  What Happens When I Purchase A Policy Online?
    A.  How is the Information that I Send to You Protected?
    B.  How Do You Ensure the Security of the Information Once I Give it to You?
    C.  What Types of Internet-Related Information am I also Sharing with You?
        1.  Cookies
        2.  IP Address
V.  What About Purchasing a Policy By Phone?
VI.  What About Purchasing a Policy Through an Agent?
VII.  What are Your Children's Guidelines?
VIII.  Consent

I.  Applicability

This Statement of Privacy and Security applies to all information gathered or maintained by Senior Market Sales, Inc (SMS). This includes information gathered electronically at websites powered by SMS ("our sites"), including TravelInsuranceCenter.com as well as information transmitted to us by telephone, fax, or otherwise by one of our affiliates or agents, and also information received from our call center. Further information about SMS, Inc. is available at http://www.seniormarketsales.com.

Travel Insurance Center (TIC) is not established in the European Union (EU) and does not offer goods and services to individuals who are in the EU.

Our sites contain links to other sites. We are not responsible for the privacy practices, the security measures, or the content of any such web site.

II.  Your Privacy

We are committed to protecting your privacy and we proudly participate in the Council of Better Business Bureaus' BBBOnLine Privacy Program, and comply with BBBOnLine Privacy standards. Further information about this program is available at http://www.bbbonline.org.

We do not sell, trade or rent your personal information to others. We may choose to do so in the future with trustworthy third parties, but you can tell us not to include your information by opting-out during the registration process, or at anytime thereafter by accessing your Personal Profile.

Questions regarding this statement should be directed to:
privacy@travelinsurancecenter.com , or by writing to: SMS. Attn: Privacy Policy, 1630 Duke St. 3d Floor, Alexandria, VA 22314 USA.

III.   Disclosure of Personally Identifiable Information
  1. What Can I Do Without Disclosing Any Information?
    A large portion of our services is available to you without entering any personal information. You can get a Quote, learn about our Products, use our Policy Picker or receive Guidance on what types of policies and products are right for your individual needs. In order to actually purchase a policy, however, we require you to provide us with certain personal information.


  2. Why Do I Need to Submit Personal Information?
    Because coverage benefits and premiums for insurance policies are affected by your individual traits and circumstances, we ask you to disclose a significant amount of personally identifiable information when you purchase your first plan at any of our sites, when you have an agent make the purchase for you, or when you phone our call center.

    Our goal is to allow you to quickly and easily purchase the insurance products that best fit your needs without jeopardizing your privacy and security in any way. We ask you to disclose personal information in order for us to:

    • Provide you with the insurance policies and/or protection plans that best meet your unique needs and preferences.
    • Verify that your purchase orders are received and accurately processed by the appropriate policy producers and/or plan administrators.
    • Maintain accurate records about who you are and where you learned about us.
    • Maintain accurate policy records and a personal profile for your secure access via the Web.
    • Deliver important materials to you pertaining to your selected policies and/or plans.
    • Contact you and/or your designated contacts directly should the need arise.


  3. What Kinds of Information Will I Have to Provide?


    1. Personal Information (Administrative)
      We ask for your title (Mr./Mrs., Ms., Dr., etc.), your name, address, date of birth, gender, and country of citizenship. We also ask you to provide a Password which allows you to update your Personal Profile, review your purchased plans, and purchase new plans at our sites. We give you the opportunity of entering additional personal information, such as telephone and fax number, beneficiary name (of life insurance benefits) and relationship of beneficiary, which may save time if you make additional online purchases in the future. For travel plans, you can provide your passport number and issuing country (of passport). In all cases, you will be given the opportunity to opt-out of receiving our newsletters by email and/or receiving emails with special promotions and product offers that we think might interest you from our merchant partners.


    2. Other Personal Information Required for Coverage
      Depending on the plan and coverage options you wish to purchase, additional information may be required about you and each additional person to be covered under the same policy or plan, or for whom you are purchasing a separate policy or plan. For each additional person to be covered you may be required to provide the same mandatory personally identifiable information you disclosed about yourself. Some travel plans require you to provide your passport number and issuing country (of passport). You may be required to disclose your Social Security Number in order to purchase certain plans.

      Additionally, to purchase online you will need to provide the type of credit card you wish to use, the credit card number, the date of expiration, your phone number, andshipping address. See the section entitled IV. What Happens When I Purchase a Policy Online? for more details.

      Purchasing your first plan at one of our sites results in the creation of a unique Personal Profile accessible only by you and/or by any agent or other person designated by you to create and/or share access to your Personal Profile and Password. You will always have the option in the My Policies area to update or change your Personal Profile (including Password), personally identifying information, and whether or not you wish to receive our newsletter and/or special promotions and select product offerings and discounts from our merchant partners.

      Finally, you will have the option to update or change your own information whenever and wherever necessary. See section G. How do I Edit or Update the Information in My Personal Profile?.

    3. Health Information
      Some insurance plans require you to submit certain personal information concerning your medical history in order to process your request. This includes, but is not limited to, your height, weight, and medical history (for diagnoses of heart condition, anemia, headaches, diabetes, cancer, and other health disorders). Before you submit any of this information, you will be asked if you agree to the disclosure of this information for the purpose of finding you a policy. We do not maintain records of your personal health information at SMS, nor do we make any other use of the information other than to pass it along to the insurer who will provide the policy to you. We cannot process your request unless you affirmatively agree to let us use the information for this purpose.

      If you begin an application for a plan that requires medical information, we will store your application in an encrypted, secure location for two weeks to facilitate completion of the application. If, at the end of two weeks, you have not completed the application or contacted us to keep your file open, that information will be deleted.
      We reserve the right to store your health information associated with specific policy applications for our records as necessary as we expand our services in the future. Any changes to the Statement of Privacy and Security will be posted immediately on this site, and you should always review the statement prior to submitting information.


  4. What Do You Do with this Information?
    We take the information that you provide and deliver it to the insurance provider/administrator that you have selected so that they can process your application.


  5. Will Any of the Personal Information Collected be Disclosed to Outside Parties?
    The insurance companies and plan administrators who administer your plan(s) will receive your information for the purpose of fulfilling your purchase order(s) and providing plan services. We do not divulge, sell, trade or rent your personal information to others. We may choose to do so in the future with trustworthy third parties, but you can tell us not to include your information by opting-out of receiving emails about promotions and special product offerings and discounts from our merchant partners during step two of the registration process or by updating your Personal Profile to reflect this preference. Also, we may provide aggregate statistics about our customers, sales, traffic patterns, and related site information to reputable third-party vendors, but these statistics will include no personally identifying information.


  6. How Do I Remove My Information from Your Database?
    If you do not wish to receive marketing email from us, or if you decide you no longer wish to receive our newsletter, you can remove yourself from our distribution lists at any time by:
    1. simply replying and inserting the word "remove" in the subject field to any marketing email you receive.


    2. logging on to our site and changing the boxes in your Personal Profile to indicate that you do not wish to receive the newsletter and/or marketing materials


    3. sending an email request for removal to privacy@travelinsurancecenter.com.


    4. writing to us at SMS attn: Dan Drennen, 8420 West Dodge Road, Suite 510, Omaha NE 68114 USA.


  7. How Do I Edit or Update the Information in My Personal Profile?
    You may update and edit your Personal Profile at any time by going to the My Policies section of the site and clicking on Edit Your Personal Profile. Your edited changes will take effect immediately upon submission. You can also use this feature to change your Password, should you so desire. If you want us to remove all of your personal information from our active database, email us at privacy@travelinsurancecenter.com or write to the address listed above and include your User ID and Password along with the request to no longer have an active Personal Profile. You may also remove the information yourself by accessing your Personal Profile and entering blank spaces in the data fields.


IV.  What Happens When I Purchase A Policy Online?

  1. How is the Information that I Send to You Protected?
    All of the information that you transmit to us electronically, including personally identifiable information disclosed during registration as well as credit card and other personally identifiable information provided during the online purchase process, is securely protected using SSL (Secure Socket Layer) 128-bit encryption. VeriSign, the world's leading provider of Internet trust services, provides the digital certificate enabling us to employ SSL encryption. (Some users, such as those accessing our site from outside the USA, may employ browsers that only support a lower level of SSL, such as 40-bit encryption). Furthermore, we have implemented strict policy guidelines to safeguard the privacy of your personally identifiable financial information from unauthorized access or improper use, and we will continue to enhance our security procedures as new technology becomes available.


  2. How Do You Ensure the Security of the Information Once I Give it to You?
    Final processing of online purchases transpires in one of two ways: 1) credit card payment information is transmitted directly to the designated insurance provider/administrator via SSL-protected secure server communication; 2) credit card payment information is transmitted from our site by encrypted email to the insurance provider where the message is decoded and processed.

    Your complete credit card information is stored only by the merchant providing your selected plan(s). We temporarily receive, but do not permanently store, complete credit card information on our server or at our offline site. For security and verification purposes we store the last four digits only of an online purchaser's credit card. The credit card's last four digits are stored with the purchase order(s) with which they are associated and are stored only for use as record locators and to verify purchase orders.


  3. What Types of Internet-Related Information am I also Sharing with You?


    1. Cookies
      "Cookies" are small pieces of information that are stored by your browser on your computer's hard drive. When you choose to register with our sites and sign in, we send a small bit of code (a cookie) back to your hard drive via your browser where it is stored temporarily until you close your browser. This code is uniquely yours. The cookie enables your browser to access your unique policy information which is necessary to make online purchases secure and to give you 24-hour access to your policy information. If your browser does not permit cookies or if you have chosen to disable your browser's ability to accept cookies, then you cannot sign in at our site, and thus can neither make online purchases nor access your policy information via the Web.

      Also, when you click through to our sites from a hyperlink situated on one of our affiliates' sites, a cookie is automatically sent to your browser identifying the affiliate site which provided the link. This cookie is stored on your browser for 90 days. It contains no personal information about you and it is used only to determine which of our affiliate sites brought you directly to us.


    2. IP Address
      We use your IP address to help diagnose problems with our server, and to administer our web site. Your IP address is used to help identify you and to gather broad demographic information.

V.  What About Purchasing a Policy By Phone?

Some policies are not currently available for purchase over the Internet. All of the policies are available for purchase through our call center. When you purchase a policy in this manner, the licensed insurance agent at the call center takes your personal information over the phone, enters it into the computer and transmits it via SSL-protected server directly to our server.

At your request, the call center will transmit the information to us via fax, rather than over the Internet. If you request this method, the call center agent will transcribe your information by hand and fax it to us, where we then enter it into our database before sending it on to the insurance provider/administrator as discussed in B. How do You Ensure the Security of the Information Once I Give it to You?, above. We then store the hardcopy in a secure location at our offline site.

Additionally, some policy applications must be faxed directly to the insurance provider. When this happens, we receive a hardcopy confirmation of your order from the insurance provider. We then input the information outlined in section C.1, Personal Information (Administrative) into our database. Of course, you maintain the right to access and edit the information at any time, by accessing your Personal Profile , or by phoning the call center.

VI.  What About Purchasing a Policy Through an Agent?

One of the most innovative e-commerce features at our sites is our ability to facilitate third-party (prospect) sales. That is, we permit agents and employers (registrars) to make purchases on behalf of clients and employees (registrees) online. A User ID, Password, and Personal Profile accessible to the registrar and the registree is generated for each registree.

During the purchase process, the registrar may choose to receive some or all correspondence and materials (notices, confirmations, purchase order fulfillments, and marketing messages from our sites) on behalf of the registree, or else indicate that some or all correspondence and material is to be delivered to the registree directly. In any case, if a registree receives marketing messages by email from any one of our sites because a registrar did not opt-out and further indicated that the registree was the proper recipient, the registree may opt-out of receiving such materials in the future by following a link in the text of the email. Furthermore, the URL linking to the Statement of Privacy and Security will be included in all email marketing correspondence in order to afford prospects (those that did not register themselves) the same opportunity as everyone else to examine SMS's privacy and security policies and act accordingly with respect to opting-out and/or removing their Personal Profile from the member database.

VII.  What are Your Children's Guidelines?

We do not knowingly collect online contact information or personally identifiable offline contact information about children from children.

We do not entice children by the prospect of a special game, prize or activity, to divulge any information about themselves for any reason. We do not permit children under the age of thirteen (13) to register with our sites, as we do not knowingly accept or store personally identifiable information submitted by children younger than thirteen, nor do we respond to, promote to, market to, or communicate with children known to be younger than thirteen years old.

However, some personally identifiable information about children must be disclosed by parents or guardians or their designated agents when such persons are engaged in the process of making online purchases of insurance and/or travel assistance plans intended to cover and/or apply to said children. Precisely what information must be disclosed is described above in C. What Kinds of Information Will I Have to Provide?

VIII.  Consent

By registering on our web site, you consent to the collection and use by us of the information you disclosed in accordance with this Statement of Privacy and Security. If we decide to change our privacy and/or security policies, we will post those changes on this page so that you are always aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances we disclose it.

Questions regarding this statement should be directed to: privacy@travelinsurancecenter.com.


The Travel Insurance Experts