Terms of service

The Kept Journal (thekeptjournal.net) is a personal travel journal written and run by one person in Bangkok, Thailand. Reading it means you accept these terms. If you don’t, please don’t use the site.

What this site is

Entries, trip pages, ledgers and planning tools — a record of my own trips and my own planning, published in case it is useful to you. Reading it costs nothing and there is nothing to buy here. The journal, the entries and the trip pages are open to anyone who turns up; the one part of the site that has an account attached to it is the Travel Hacker atlas, and the next section says what that account is and is not.

Accounts

An account is free. One per person, on an address you can actually receive mail at, and you sign in with a link I email you rather than a password. There is no paid plan today; if one appears, its terms will be written here before anyone is asked for money.

What the account gets you today is saving: the atlas itself is open, all 4,099 trips, signed in or not. That may change — I may put the atlas behind a free account, with a preview of 24 trips for everyone and roughly 123 for a free account. If it does, the allowance an account already has will only ever grow, never shrink.

What the atlas is for is planning your own travel. Not for scraping, not for automated collection, and not for republishing the board or any part of it — the same rule as the rest of the site, in “The words and pictures are mine” below, and an account does not buy an exception to it. I may close an account that abuses the site, and I’ll tell you why if you ask.

Every price and plan in the atlas is a planning estimate and carries no warranty. “Prices and costs are dated estimates” below applies to all of it.

You can delete the account yourself, whenever you like, from your account page. What is stored, who else sees it and how long any of it is kept is in the privacy policy.

Nothing here is advice

Everything on this site is information, not advice. It is not travel, legal, financial, medical or safety advice, and it is not a recommendation to go anywhere or do anything. Roads, borders, visa rules, permits, prices and safety conditions change constantly and differ by nationality — most of what I write is checked for a Thai passport, which may not be yours.

Check the official source — the embassy, the immigration office, the park authority, the operator, your own government’s travel advice — before you rely on anything you read here. Your trip is your responsibility.

Prices and costs are dated estimates

Every price, cost and ledger figure is either what I actually paid or an estimate made on a stated date, usually in Thai baht with a US-dollar figure alongside at that day’s rate. Estimates are labelled as estimates. They will be wrong by the time you read them: currencies move, fuel and fares move, and a counter price is not a posted price. Use them as a starting point for your own research, never as a quote.

Affiliate links

Some outbound booking links may earn me a commission if you book through them, at no extra cost to you. Where that is true the link carries a visible affiliate badge beside it. The site keeps a disclosure flag against every booking link and simply refuses to render one that hasn’t been marked, so an undisclosed commission link cannot reach a page by accident.

A commission never changes what I write. The ledger shows what was actually paid, and a place I didn’t like is written up as a place I didn’t like.

The words and pictures are mine

The text, photographs, video and data on this site are mine unless something is credited to someone else, in which case it belongs to them and their terms apply. You are welcome to link to any page and to quote a short passage with a credit and a link back.

Anything more — republishing an entry, reusing a photograph or a clip, or scraping the site or its data for a dataset, an index or a model — needs my written permission first. Ask at hello@thekeptjournal.net.

Embedded YouTube

Entry pages and trip pages show videos from my YouTube channel. Until you press play there is only a still picture of one; the player is YouTube’s, not mine, and loading it is your choice. Watching is subject to YouTube’s Terms of Service and Google’s Privacy Policy, and comments you leave on a video live on YouTube under those terms. What that costs you in data, and what I do with comments, is described in the privacy policy.

Your email address

Your address is used for two things and no others: signing you in, and — only if you tick the box asking for it — telling you when a journal entry or a trip pack is published. No selling, no sharing, no third-party lists, no tracking pixel in anything I send.

Every news message carries a one-click unsubscribe that works without signing in, and the same switch sits on your account page. Deleting the account takes the address with it. If you’d rather I did any of that by hand, ask at hello@thekeptjournal.net.

No warranty

The site is provided “as is” and “as available”, with no warranty of any kind. I don’t promise it will be accurate, complete, current, uninterrupted or error-free, and I may change, move or delete any part of it at any time without notice. That includes the account: I may change what a free account sees, or stop offering accounts altogether, and if I do you can still take your data with you from your account page first.

Liability

To the fullest extent Thai law allows, I am not liable for any loss, injury, cost or damage arising from your use of this site or from anything you did or didn’t do because of it — a trip that went wrong, a price that had changed, a border you couldn’t cross, or a third-party site you reached from a link here. Nothing in these terms excludes liability that the law does not allow to be excluded.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of the Kingdom of Thailand, and the Thai courts have jurisdiction over any dispute arising out of them or out of your use of the site.

Changes to these terms

This page is updated in place and the date at the top changes with it. There is no archive of earlier versions. Using the site after a change means you accept the current version. If you have an account, the date in force when you agreed is recorded against your account, so what you agreed to is always a specific wording rather than whatever this page says today.

Contact

hello@thekeptjournal.net — one person, in Bangkok, Thailand.