Cookie policy

Effective date: 8 July 2026

1. What This Policy Covers

This Cookie Policy explains what cookies and similar technologies Transport Chief (“we”, “us” or “our”) uses on our platform, why we use them, and the choices available to you. It supplements our Privacy Policy, which covers how we handle personal information more generally.

2. What Are Cookies

Cookies are small text files placed on your device by a website you visit. They let the site remember information about your visit, such as whether you are signed in or your preferences, so you don’t have to re-enter it every time.

3. Cookies We Use

Strictly necessary (always on)

These cookies are required for the Service to function and cannot be turned off.

• Session / authentication cookie: keeps you signed in and identifies your session to the server. Deleted when you log out or when it expires.
• CSRF / sign-in state cookies: short-lived cookies used during login and Google/Microsoft sign-in to protect against cross-site request forgery and to carry temporary state through the sign-in handshake.
• Bot-protection cookie (Cloudflare Turnstile): set while completing the security check on our login, registration, and forgot-password forms, so you aren’t asked to repeat the check needlessly.
• Cookie-consent record: remembers the choices you make on this banner (tc_cookie_consent), so we don’t ask again on every visit. It records your analytics choice and your session-recording choice separately. Stored for 1 year.

Analytics and session recording (your choice)

There are three levels, and you choose between them on the cookie banner or through Cookie preferences in the footer of any page.

• Necessary only. No analytics cookies are set. Google Analytics still runs, but in a cookieless mode: it counts the page view and writes nothing at all to your device. Microsoft Clarity is not loaded and no session is recorded.
• Analytics. Google Analytics runs normally and sets its own cookies, so we can tell a returning visit from a new one. Microsoft Clarity is still not loaded.
• Analytics and session recording. As above, and Microsoft Clarity is loaded as well, which records how you move around the site.

We should be straightforward about what the first level does and does not do. Nothing is stored on your device, and we cannot recognise you on a later visit. But your browser still makes a request to Google, and that request carries your IP address and browser type, as every request to any website does. If you would rather Google received nothing at all, most browsers and tracking-blocker extensions can block requests to google-analytics.com and googletagmanager.com. Doing that will not affect how this site works.

The analytics cookies themselves

These are set by Google and Microsoft, not by us, and only at the levels described above.

• Google Analytics (_ga, _ga_<property>): distinguishes one visitor from another and one visit from another, so we can see which pages people use and where a journey breaks. Set only if you accept analytics. Typically stored for up to 2 years.
• Microsoft Clarity (_clck, _clsk, CLID, ANONCHK, MR, MUID, SM): supports session recording and heatmaps, so we can see where the design gets in the way. Set only if you accept session recording. Expiries range from one day to a year, and Microsoft deletes the underlying data after 30 days.

None of this is used for advertising. We run no advertising, we do not sell or share this information, and the advertising signals Google Analytics understands are set to “denied” on every page and at every level, including the highest one.

Elsewhere on our platform

Some pages on our platform are the public booking pages we host for our operator customers. Those pages use the same Cloudflare Turnstile bot protection described above when a booking enquiry is submitted, and they run no analytics at all: neither Google Analytics nor Microsoft Clarity is loaded on them, at any level.

4. Your Choices

When you first visit, the cookie banner offers Accept all and Necessary only, plus a Manage preferences link if you want to choose the levels separately. Strictly necessary cookies are always set, since the Service cannot function without them (for example, staying signed in).

You can change your mind at any time, from any page, using the Cookie preferences link in the footer. It opens the same panel, already showing your current choices. Withdrawing is deliberately no harder than accepting.

What happens when you withdraw

Google Analytics stops storing anything on your device immediately, and we delete the Google Analytics cookies your browser holds for this site.

Session recording is the one case where we cannot undo everything on the spot, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise. Turning it off stops it on every page from then on, and we delete the two Microsoft Clarity cookies we are able to reach. A recording already in progress on the page you are looking at continues until you reload that page, which is why the panel tells you to reload. Some of Clarity’s cookies are set by Microsoft on its own domains and cannot be deleted by this site; you can remove those through your browser settings.

If you chose before session recording was a separate option

Session recording used to be included in a single “analytics” choice. If you accepted analytics before that changed, we have kept your analytics choice and treated session recording as off, because you were never asked about it specifically. You can turn it on in Cookie preferences if you want to.

You can also control cookies through your browser settings at any time, including deleting existing cookies and blocking cookies from being set in future, though blocking necessary cookies will prevent you from signing in.

5. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Cookie Policy from time to time, for example if we add or remove a cookie or a third-party service. Material changes will be reflected by an updated effective date above.

6. Contact Us

If you have any questions about this Cookie Policy, please contact us at:

Transport Chief
Email: info@transportchief.co.nz