Privacy policy

Contact data of our Data Protection Officer

KölnTourismus GmbH
Data Protection Officer HEC Harald Eul Consulting GmbH
Kardinal-Höffner-Platz 1, 50667 Cologne
E-Mail: datenschutz@koelntourismus.de

controller as defined under data protection law

KölnTourismus GmbH
Kardinal-Höffner-Platz 1, 50667 Cologne
Telephone: +49 (0) 221 346 43 0
Fax: +49 (0) 221 346 43 429
E-Mail: info@koelntourismus.de

We process personal data in accordance with the stipulations of the General Data-Protection Regulation (GDPR), the German Federal Data-Protection Act (Bundesdatenschutzgesetz - BDSG) and other applicable data-protection provisions (details are provided in the following). The details of which data are processed and how they are used, possibly also using artificial intelligence (AI),  depends largely on the services requested or agreed in each case. Further details or extensions of the purposes of the data processing can be seen from the respective contract documentation, forms, from a declaration of consent and/or other information provided to you (e.g. within the scope of use of our website or in our terms and conditions of business). This data protection information may also be updated from time to time.

2.1 Purposes for fulfilment of a contract or of contractual measures (Art. 6 (1) (b) GDPR)
The processing of personal data is carried out for the purpose of executing our contracts with you, for the execution of your orders as well as for the performance of measures and activities in the context of pre-contractual relationships, e.g. with interested parties. The processing is therefore in particular for the purpose of providing tourist services and deliveries of products in accordance with your orders and wishes, and covers the services, measures and activities necessary for this. This includes essentially the contract-related communication with you, the verifiability of transactions, orders and other agreements, also for quality control through corresponding documentation, goodwill measures, measures for managing and optimising business processes as well as for the fulfilment of the general duties of care, management and control through affiliated companies (e.g. parent company), statistical evaluations for corporate management, cost recording and controlling, reporting, internal and external communication, emergency management, settlement and fiscal evaluation of operating performances, risk management, assertion of legal entitlements and defence in legal disputes, ensuring IT security (among other things system or plausibility tests) and general safety, including building and system safety, ensuring and safeguarding domestic authority (e.g. through access controls), ensuring the integrity, authenticity and availability of the data, prevention and clarification of criminal offences, control through supervisory bodies or control instances (e.g. internal audit).

2.2 Purposes in the context of a justified interest of us or third parties (Art. 6 (1) (f) GDPR)
In addition to the actual fulfilment of the contract or pre-contract, we may possibly process your data if this is necessary in order to safeguard justified interests of us or third parties, in particular for purposes:

• of advertising or market and opinion research, if you have not objected to the use of your data
• of obtaining credit information as well as the exchange of data with credit agencies, insofar as this goes beyond our economic risk,
• of checking and optimising requirements-analysis procedures,
• of further development of products and services as well as of existing systems and processes,
• the training and (further) development of AI applications,
• of disclosing personal data within the scope of due diligence measures in negotiations concerning the sale of a company,
• of comparing European and international anti-terror lists, insofar as this goes beyond the statutory obligations,
• of enriching our data, among other things through the use or research of publicly accessible data,
• of statistical evaluations or market analysis,
• of benchmarking,
• of asserting legal claims and defence in legal disputes that cannot be assigned directly to the contractual relationship,
• of restricted storage of the data, if erasure is not possible due to the particular form of storage, or is possible only at disproportionately high expense,
• of developing scoring systems or automated decision-making processes,
• of preventing and clarifying criminal offences, insofar as not exclusively for the fulfilment of statutory requirements,
• of building and system safety (e.g. through access controls and video surveillance) insofar as this goes beyond the general duties of care,
• of internal and external investigations, security checks,
• of possible listening in on or recording of telephone conversations for quality-control and training purposes,
• of obtaining and maintaining certifications of a private-law or official nature,
• of ensuring and exercising domestic authority through corresponding measures, as well as through video surveillance, for the purpose of protecting our customers and employees as well as for securing evidence related to criminal offences and their prevention.

2.3 Purposes within the scope of your consent (Art. 6 (1) (a) GDPR)
The processing of your personal data for specific purposes (e.g. use of your email address for marketing purposes) is only possible on the basis of your consent. As a rule, you can revoke your consent at any time. This also applies to the revocation of declarations of consent issued to us before application of the GDPR, i.e. before 25 May 2018. You will be informed separately of the purposes, the consequences of revocation or of failure to issue consent in the corresponding consent text.
As a general rule, the revocation of consent is effective only for the future. Processing carried out prior to the revocation is not affected and shall remain lawful.

2.4 Purposes for the fulfilment of statutory requirements (Art. 6 (1) (c) GDPR) or in the public interest (Art. 6 (1) (e) GDPR)
As is the case with all parties involved in economic life, we are also subject to a number of legal obligations. These are primarily statutory requirements (e.g. commercial and tax laws, but possibly also supervisory-law or other official requirements). The purposes of the processing can include the verification of identity and age, the prevention of fraud and money laundering, the prevention, combating and clarification of terrorism financing and asset-threatening criminal offences, comparisons with European and international anti-terror lists, the fulfilment of fiscal-law control and reporting obligations as well as the archiving of data for data-protection and data-security purposes, and also auditing by tax and other authorities. The disclosure of personal data can also be necessary in the context of official/judicial measures for the purpose of taking evidence, criminal prosecution or the assertion of civil-law claims.

If necessary for the provision of our services, we process personal data received legally from other companies or other third parties (e.g. credit agencies, address providers). We also process personal data lawfully taken, received or acquired from publicly accessible sources (e.g. telephone directories, commercial register, register of associations, register of residents, debtor registers, land registers, press, Internet and other media) and that we are entitled to process.

Relevant categories of personal data can be in particular:

• data on persons (name, date of birth, place of birth, nationality, marital status, profession/industry and comparable data)
• contact data (address, email address, telephone number and comparable data)
• address data (registration data and comparable data)
• payment/cover confirmation for bank and credit cards
• information on your financial position (credit-rating data including scoring, i.e. data for the purpose of assessing the economic risk)
• customer history
• data on your use of the tele-media offered by us (e.g. time of call-up of our websites, apps or newsletters, our sites/links clicked on, or entries and comparable data)
• video and photo data

Within our organisation, your data is made available to those internal bodies and organisational units that require these for the fulfilment of our contractual and statutory obligations, or in the context of the handling and implementation of our justified interest. Any forwarding of your data to external bodies takes place exclusively

• in connection with processing of the contract,
• for purposes of fulfilment of statutory requirements, under which we are obliged to provide information, to report or to forward data, or if the forwarding of the data is in the public interest (see Number 2.4),
• if external service providers process data on our behalf as order data processors or assumers of functions (e.g. external computing centres, support/maintenance of EDP/IT applications, archiving, voucher processing, call-centre services, compliance services, controlling, data screening for anti-money-laundering purposes, data validation or plausibility checking, data destruction, purchasing/procurement, customer administration, letter shops, marketing, media technology, research, risk controlling, settlement, telephony, website management, auditing services, banks, printers or data disposal companies, courier services, logistics),
• on the basis of our justified interest or of the justified interest of the third party within the scope of the purposes stated under Number 2.2 (e.g. to authorities, credit agencies, debt collection, lawyers, courts, expert assessors, and group companies, bodies and control instances),
• if you have issued us with your consent to the forwarding to third parties.

We shall not forward your data to third parties for any other reasons. If we appoint service providers within the scope of order processing, your data will be covered by the same security standards there as with us. In other cases, the recipients are entitled to use the data solely for the purposes for which they have provided to them.

We process and store your data for the duration of our business relationship. This also includes the initiation of a contract (pre-contractual legal relationship) and the winding up of a contract.

We are also subject to various retention and documentation obligations, resulting among other things from the German Commercial Code (HGB) and the German Tax Code (AO). The retention or documentation periods prescribed therein are up to ten years after the end of the business relationship or of the pre-contractual business relationship.

Special statutory regulations may also require retention for a longer period, e.g. the preservation of evidence in the context of the statutory time-barring regulations. Under Sections 195 et seq. of the German Civil Code (BGB) the normal limitation period is three years; nevertheless, limitation periods of up to 30 years can apply.

If the data are no longer required for the fulfilment of contractual or statutory obligations and rights, they will be erased as a routine procedure, unless their further processing – for a limited period -–is necessary for fulfilment of the purposes stated under Number 2.2 based on a predominantly justified interest. Such a predominantly justified interest shall also be given for example if erasure is not possible – or possible only at disproportionately high expense – due to the particular form of storage, and processing for other purposes is excluded using suitable technical and organisational measures.

Data will be forwarded to bodies in countries outside the European Union (EU) or the European Economic Area (EEA) (so-called third countries) if this is necessary for the execution of an order/contract from or with you, if it is prescribed by law (e.g. fiscal-law reporting obligations), is part of a justified interest of us or a third party, or if you have issued your consent.

In this respect, the processing of your data in a third country can also take place in connection with the involvement of service providers within the scope of the order processing. If no resolution of the EU Commission is available concerning an appropriate level of data protection in the country concerned, we shall ensure appropriate protection and guarantees of your rights and liberties through corresponding contracts in accordance with the EU data protection requirements. We shall provide you with corresponding detailed information on request.

Information on the suitable or appropriate guarantees and on the possibility of obtaining a copy of these, can be requested from the Company Data Protection Officer if required.

Under certain circumstances you can assert your data protection rights against us

• For example, you have the right to receive information from us concerning your data stored by us pursuant to the rulings of Art. 15 GDPR (possibly with restrictions pursuant to Section 34 BDSG).
• Upon request by you, we shall rectify the data stored on you pursuant to Art. 16 GDPR if these are inaccurate or incorrect.
• If you wish, we shall erase your data in accordance with the principles of Art. 17 GDPR, provided no other statutory rulings (e.g. statutory retention periods or the restrictions pursuant to Section 35 BDSG), or a predominant interest of us (e.g. for defending our rights and entitlements), stand in the way of this.
• Taking account of the preconditions of Art. 18 GDPR, you can ask us to restrict the processing of your data.
• You can also file a complaint against the processing of your data pursuant to Art. 21 GDPR, on the basis of which we are obliged to end the processing of your data. Nevertheless, this right of objection applies only given the presence of very special circumstances concerning your personal situation. In this respect, rights of our organisation may stand in the way of your right of objection.
• Subject to the preconditions of Art. 20 GDPR, you also have the right to receive your data – or to forward them to a third party – in a structured, commonly-used and machine-readable format.
• You also have the right to revoke consent – already issued – to the processing of personal data by us at any time with effect for the future (see Number 2.3).
• In addition, you have a right to complain to a data protection supervisory authority (Art. 77 GDPR). However, we recommend that complaints always be addressed initially to our Data Protection Officer.

If possible, your applications concerning the exercise of your rights should be sent in writing to the above address or directly to our Data Protection Officer.

You are only obliged to provide the data required for the start and execution of a business relationship or for a pre-contractual relationship with us, or data that we are obliged to collect by law. Without these data, we shall not, as a rule, be in a position to conclude or execute the contract. This can also apply to data required later in the context of the business relationship. If we request additional data from you, we shall draw your separate attention to the voluntary nature of the information.

We do not use purely automated decision-making procedures as per Article 22 GDPR. If we nevertheless use such a procedure in individual cases in future, we shall inform you of this separately, insofar as this is prescribed by the law.

Under certain circumstances we process your data in part with the aim of evaluating specific personal aspects (profiling).

We may use evaluation instruments to enable us to provide you with targeted information and advice on products. These enable requirements-oriented product design, communication and advertising, including market and opinion research.

Such procedures can also be used to enable the assessment of your financial position and creditworthiness as well as for combating money laundering and fraud. So-called “score values” can be used to assess your financial position and creditworthiness. A scoring uses mathematical procedures to calculate the probability of a customer meeting his/her payment obligations in contractually-conform manner. These score values thus assist us for example in assessing creditworthiness, in decisions in the context of product contracts, and are included in our risk management. The calculation is based on mathematically-statistically recognised and proven procedures, and is carried out on the basis of your data, in particular income situation, outgoings, existing liabilities, profession, employer, length of employment, experience from previous business relationships, contractually conform repayment of previous loans as well as information from credit agencies.

In this respect, we do not process information on nationality or special categories of personal data as per Art. 9 GDPR.

Information on your right of objection pursuant to Art. 21 GDPR

1. You have the right to file an objection at any time against the processing of your data on the basis of Art. 6 (1) (f) GDPR (data processing on the basis of a weighing-up of interests) or Art. 6 (1) (e) GDPR (data processing in the public interest), given the presence of reasons resulting from your particular situation. This also applies to profiling based on this provision as defined in Art. 4 No. 4 GDPR.

   If you file an objection, we shall then no longer process your personal data, unless we can demonstrate compelling reasons for the processing warranting protection, and these prevail over your interests, rights and liberties, or if the processing is for the purpose of asserting, exercising or defence of legal entitlements.

2. We may possibly also process your personal data for the purpose of carrying out direct advertising. If you do not wish to receive advertising, you have the right to object to this at any time. This also applies to the profiling insofar as this is connected to any such direct advertising. We shall comply with this objection for the future.

   We shall no longer process your data for direct advertising purposes if you object to processing for these purposes.

The objection can be filed informally and, if possible, should be addressed to

KölnTourismus GmbH
Kardinal-Höffner-Platz 1
50667 Cologne

10.1 Data protection information from KölnTourismus GmbH (Cologne Tourist Board) regarding the use of guestoo

We use the cloud solution guestoo (https://www.guestoo.cloud/en/) either separately or as part of our online services in order to handle the guest management of events that we organize ourselves, including those which we organize in cooperation with third parties (partners). For the management of the events, we transfer the personal data of the guests planned by us — and in the case of joint events, those planned by partners — to guestoo. The other processes (e.g. the dispatch of invitations, registrations, cancellations, correspondence in the run-up to the event and admission checks) are also managed through guestoo. For these purposes, we mainly enter and collect the following personal data:

• e-mail address
• Name
• Title
• Professional position
• Telephone number
• Institution
• The institution’s address data
• The name and institution of any accompanying persons

Pursuant to Article 6 (1) f GDPR (balancing of interests), we and guestoo store this data and process it through guestoo solely in the context of the respective event. Insofar as additional people are registered for an event (e.g. accompanying persons), the data processing takes place on the basis of Article 6 (1) b GDPR.

Insofar as we carry out individual events in cooperation with partners and that we are solely responsible for the event organization within this context, we will subsequently transfer the respective final guest list including the collected data and the participation status to the respective partner. This information is transferred on the basis of the respective partner’s overriding legitimate interest pursuant to Article 6 (1) f GDPR.

We process and store your data within guestoo for the period required to organize the respective event (including the corresponding preparation and follow-up phases). This does not affect any legal obligations to retain data. We will delete your data in guestoo within one year after an event has ended, insofar as you have not been invited to another event. You have the right to object to this, of course.

KölnTourismus GmbH (Cologne Tourist Board) has concluded a data processing agreement with the operator of guestoo (code piraten UG, Managing Director: Stefan Wirtz, Am Ruhmbach 44, 45149 Essen, Germany). KölnTourismus GmbH monitors the processing of your personal data in accordance with the requirements of the GDPR.

You can obtain further information about the use of your data on this website in guestoo’s privacy policy (https://www.guestoo.cloud/en/privacy).

10.2 Privacy policy for online meetings, conference calls, and webinars using “Zoom”

In the following, we would like to provide you with information about the processing of personal data in connection with the use of Zoom.

Purpose of the data processing
We use the tool Zoom to conduct conference calls, online meetings, video conferences and/or webinars (subsequently referred to hereinafter as “online meetings”). Zoom is a service provided by Zoom Video Communications, Inc., which is based in the USA.

Responsible organization
The Cologne Tourist Board is responsible for the data processing that is done in direct connection with the performance of online meetings.
Note: Insofar as you call up the website of Zoom, the provider of Zoom is responsible for the data processing. However, you do not need to call up the website in order to use Zoom. You only need to do so to download the software for the use of Zoom. You can also use Zoom if you directly enter the respective meeting ID and any additional access data for the meeting into the Zoom app. If you cannot use the Zoom app or do not wish to do so, you can use the basic functions via a browser version, which you can also find on the Zoom website.

Which data are processed?
A variety of types of data are processed whenever you use Zoom. The scope of the data processed also depends on the data you produce before or during your participation in an online meeting.

The following personal data are processed:

• Information about the user: First name, surname, telephone number (optional), e-mail address, password (if the single sign-on option is not used), a profile picture (optional), department (optional)
• Meeting metadata: Topic, description (optional), IP addresses of the participants, device/hardware information
• When recording meetings (optional): MP4 file of all video, audio and presentation recordings, M4A file of all audio recordings, text file of the online meeting chat.
• When dialling in by phone: The telephone numbers of the outgoing and incoming calls, the name of the country, the starting and finishing time. Where appropriate, additional connection data such as the IP address of the device in question may also be stored.
• Text, audio and video data: During an online meeting, if appropriate you can use the chat, question and survey functions. The texts you enter will be processed insofar as they are to be displayed in the online meeting and, if necessary to log them. To enable the display of video and the replay of audio, the data from microphone and video camera (if applicable) of your terminal will be processed accordingly for the duration of the meeting. You can turn off/mute the camera and the microphone at any time via the Zoom applications.
  In order to take part in an online meeting or enter the “meeting room”, you will have to give your name at the very least.

Scope of data processing
We use Zoom in order to conduct online meetings. Whenever we want to record online meetings, we will transparently notify you of this fact in advance and, if necessary, ask for your approval. The Zoom app also shows you if a meeting is being recorded.
We will also record chat content if this is necessary in order to document the results of an online meeting. However, this is generally not done.
In order to record and follow-up webinars, we can also process the questions posed by webinar participants.
If you are registered as a user of Zoom, reports about online meetings (meeting metadata, dial-in data, the questions and answers during webinars, surveys during webinars) can be stored at Zoom for up to one month.
We do not use automated decision-making in the sense of Art. 22 of the GDPR.

The legal basis for the data processing
If personal data of the employees of the Cologne Tourist Board are processed, the legal basis of the data processing is Section 26 BDSG (German Data Protection Act). If personal data associated with the use of Zoom are not needed for the performance of the employment relationship or its termination but be essential for the use of Zoom, the legal basis for the data processing is Art. 6 (1) (f) of GDPR. In such cases, our interest is that online meetings are effectively carried out.
Apart from that, the legal basis for data processing in connection with the performance of online meetings is Art. 6 (1) (b) GDPR if the meetings are conducted within the context of contractual relationships.
If no contractual relationship exists, the legal basis is Article 6 (1) (f) GDPR. In such cases, our interest is also that online meetings are effectively carried out.

Recipient/transfer of data
Personal data that is processed in connection with a person’s participation in online meetings are in principle not forwarded to third parties insofar as they are not specifically intended for such a transfer. Please note: As is the case with face-to-face meetings, the content from online meetings is often specifically intended to be forwarded in order to communicate information to customers, interested individuals, or third parties.
Other recipients: The provider of Zoom necessarily learns of the aforementioned data insofar as this is specified in our data processing contract with Zoom.

Data processing outside of the European Union
Zoom is a service offered by a provider based in the USA. As a result, personal data is also processed in a non-EU country. However, we have concluded a data processing contract with the provider of Zoom that fulfils the requirements of Art. 28 GDPR.
An appropriate level of data protection is guaranteed by signing of the standard contractual clauses of the EU.

Our data protection statement as well as the information on data protection concerning our data processing pursuant to Art. 13, 14 and 21 GDPR can alter from time to time. All alterations will be published on this site.

Data protection information last amended 03.06.2024