Acceptable Use Policy

Scope

This policy applies to reviews, uploaded trip photographs, testimonials, and anything else you submit to us through a form, an email, or WhatsApp.

In practice, that covers a fairly wide range of things you might actually send us: a star rating and a written review after a trip, a photograph of the vehicle or the driver that you offer to share, a testimonial you agree we may publish, a message through our enquiry form, and a comment left against a booking on WhatsApp. It applies whether that content is meant for this website, for our social channels, or simply for our own records, because the same standard has to hold wherever it ends up, and we do not apply a looser one to something sent privately than to something posted in public.

It does not cover the trip itself. The standard we hold ourselves to on the road, on how a fare is worked out, and on how a booking is made, changed or cancelled, is set out in the Terms of Use and the Booking Terms, not here. This page is about content: what you send us, what you may not send us, and what we do with it once you have.

Content you may not submit

The list below is a legal requirement: the IT Rules, 2021 require any website that lets people post reviews or photographs to enumerate these categories in full, and leaving even one out would cost us the legal protection that lets us host what you write and share. Quite apart from the law, it is also a plain, reasonable line for any site that accepts a review, a photograph or a comment from the public. You may not submit content on this website that:

• is obscene, pornographic or paedophilic
• invades another person’s privacy, including their bodily privacy
• is insulting or harassing on the basis of gender
• is racially or ethnically objectionable
• relates to or encourages money laundering or gambling
• is harmful to a child
• infringes any patent, trademark, copyright or other proprietary right
• is deceptive or misleading as to the origin of the message
• impersonates another person
• threatens the unity, integrity, defence, security or sovereignty of India, friendly relations with foreign States, or public order, or incites the commission of a cognisable offence
• contains a software virus or any other malicious code
• is patently false or misleading, but is published or shared in a manner that may deceive or mislead the reader about its origin

In addition, you may not use this website to post a fake review, to smear a competitor, to solicit business, to send spam, to scrape our content, to access our systems in an automated or unauthorised way, or to test our security without our prior written authorisation. Testing our security with authorisation is covered separately at /legal/responsible-disclosure.

Takedown

We remove content that breaches this policy on our own review, and on a valid court order or a notification from an authorised government agency we act within 36 hours, as Rule 3(1)(d) of the IT Rules, 2021 requires. Where we remove your content, we tell you why.

In practice, we come to know about a problem one of three ways. We notice it ourselves, reading through a review or a photograph before or after it goes up on the website. A visitor tells us, using the contact details on this website or the grievance route at /grievance-redressal, that something posted here should not be there. Or a court or an authorised government agency sends us a formal order or notification under the IT Rules, which is the situation the 36-hour clock above specifically applies to. All three routes are treated seriously; we do not wait for the most formal of the three before we act on a genuine breach.

Removal itself is straightforward. The content comes off the page, the review, or wherever it was published, and where it was already visible to the public we take it down as soon as we have satisfied ourselves that the complaint or the order is valid. We do not leave content up for the sake of convenience while paperwork is sorted out, and we do not wait to be asked twice.

Where we remove something you submitted, we write to you and say why, pointing to the part of this policy, or the order, that applies, rather than leaving you to guess. If you believe we have got it wrong, you may write back and explain your side, and where a genuine disagreement remains, we tell you about the grievance route at /grievance-redressal.

Suspension

Repeated or serious breach of this policy is grounds for us to stop accepting further submissions from you, and we will tell you if we do.

In practice, this is rare, and it is kept for a pattern rather than a single lapse. A first breach, in most cases, gets the content removed and a message explaining why; we do not suspend someone over one isolated mistake in judgement. Suspension is what follows when the same person keeps submitting content that breaches this policy after already being told, or when a single submission is serious enough on its own to warrant it, such as content that is obscene, that impersonates someone, or that is plainly a fake review written to mislead other travellers.

A suspension under this policy affects only your ability to submit further reviews, photographs or testimonials to us. It has no bearing on a booking you have made or are entitled to make, and it never affects the transport we provide you; those are governed by the Terms of Use and the Booking Terms, not by this one. Where we suspend someone’s ability to submit content, we tell them plainly why, and what would need to change for that to be reconsidered.

Our intellectual property

The Om Travels name, our wordmark, our route and fare data, our photography and our site code are our property or are used under licence.

That covers more than the obvious things. Our site code, meaning the software that runs this website end to end, is ours. Our route and fare data, meaning the distances, the per-kilometre rates and the way a quotation is worked out, is ours, built up from years of actually running these routes rather than taken from anywhere else. Our photography, meaning the images of our vehicles and our work that appear on this website, is ours or is used under a licence that permits it. Our name and our wordmark are ours to use as the mark of this business, wherever they appear.

This matters in a concrete way and not only a formal one. Our fare data took real effort to put together correctly, and it tells a competing operator exactly how we price a route, which is not something we publish for anyone to lift into a rival service or a comparison tool. Automated scraping of this website, for that reason or any other, falls under the prohibited conduct set out under Content you may not submit, above, and is separately addressed at /legal/responsible-disclosure where it concerns testing our systems rather than simply copying what is published on them.

Nothing in this policy grants you a right to use any of it beyond viewing this website in the ordinary way a browser shows it to you.

The licence you grant us

When you send us a photograph from your trip, write a review, or agree to a testimonial, we would like to be able to use it, on this website, in our marketing, and on our social channels, so that someone considering booking us can see what an actual trip with us looked like rather than only read our own description of it. This clause is what makes that possible, and it exists so that neither side is left guessing about what happens to something you have chosen to share with us.

When you submit a photograph, video, review or testimonial to us, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to use, reproduce and display it in our marketing, on our website and on our social channels, with credit where you have asked for it. You may revoke this licence at any time by writing to us, and we will remove the content from our own channels within 30 days. You confirm that you own the content or have permission to grant this licence, and that any identifiable person in it has consented.

Revoking the licence is exactly as simple as that clause says. Write to us and tell us which photograph, review or testimonial you would like taken down, and we act on it; we do not ask you to explain why, and we do not make it conditional on anything. Within 30 days it comes off our website, our marketing and our social channels. A social platform’s own caching, or a search engine’s own index, can occasionally lag behind that for a short while longer, which is outside our control rather than a delay on our part.

Revoking the licence removes our right to use the content going forward. It does not undo a use that already happened before you wrote to us, such as a printed brochure already distributed or a social post already seen and shared by other people, and it has no bearing on any booking or account record we separately hold for our own accounting, operational or legal purposes, which this policy does not govern.

Third-party intellectual property

Where a stock image, a map, or a mark belonging to another party appears on this website, it is used under licence or on a nominative fair-use basis and remains the property of its owner.

In practice, that includes things such as a map or a map tile used to show where we operate, and a manufacturer’s name used only to describe a vehicle class we actually run, such as referring to a car by its make and model. Naming a manufacturer this way, purely to describe a vehicle honestly, is what is called nominative fair use: we are naming it to tell you what it is, not claiming any association with, or endorsement by, that manufacturer.

Copyright complaint

If you believe content on this website infringes your copyright, write to info@om-travels.in identifying the work, the exact page it appears on, and your contact details, and we will act on a valid complaint promptly.

We look into every complaint we receive on this basis. Where it is clear and appears valid, we remove or disable the content while we look into it properly, and we tell the person who submitted it why, in keeping with the Takedown section above. Where a complaint is incomplete, such as not naming the exact page or not making clear what right is being claimed, we write back and ask for what is missing before we act on it, because acting on an unclear complaint risks removing something that was never actually infringing in the first place.

If you are the person who submitted the content and you believe it was removed in error, you may write back and explain why, and we will look at it again.