Terms of Service

1. What Exploras is — and what it is not

Exploras is an online directory of tours, transport, services and events on the Samaná Peninsula, Dominican Republic. We publish information about Hosts and their offers so that Travellers can discover them and contact them directly.

• Exploras does not organise, operate or supply any tour, transfer, rental, service or event. Every offer on the Service is provided by an independent Host.
• Exploras does not process the payment for the experience itself, does not hold funds for Hosts, does not issue tickets or vouchers and takes no commission from Hosts. The Host’s price is paid by the Traveller directly to the Host.
• Exploras is not a travel agency, tour operator, broker, agent, insurer or guarantor of any Host, and is not a party to any contract between a Traveller and a Host.
• Contact between a Traveller and a Host takes place outside the Service, on WhatsApp or another channel the Host chooses. We do not see, moderate or store that conversation.

Hosts may also pay for the optional Plan Visibilidad described in section 7.10. It is a fixed monthly fee for extra visibility on the Service, not a commission on anything a Traveller pays a Host.

Some websites we link to are operated by businesses affiliated with the operator of Exploras (for example a spa, a wedding-planning site and a real-estate agency in Las Terrenas). Those sites have their own terms and policies; a link is not an endorsement or a guarantee.

2. Eligibility and accounts

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account, to contact a Host through the Service or to list a business on it. If you are under 18 you may only use the Service under the supervision of a parent or legal guardian who accepts these Terms on your behalf.

• An account is optional for Travellers: you can browse the Service and contact Hosts without one. An account lets you save favourites.
• You must give accurate, current information when you create an account and keep it up to date. You may hold one account per person or business.
• You are responsible for keeping your password confidential and for everything done under your account. Tell us at once through the contact form if you suspect unauthorised use.
• We may refuse, suspend or close an account at any time if we reasonably believe these Terms have been breached, if the account is used to harm Hosts, Travellers or the Service, or if the law requires it.
• You may close your account at any time by asking us through the contact form. Section 14 describes what happens to your data.

3. Contacting a Host through the Service

Each listing carries a button that composes a WhatsApp message to the Host. Before you send it, the Service may ask for details such as your first name, group size, preferred date, route or vehicle so that the message is useful to the Host. We record those details, the listing concerned and a random reference so that we can follow up on the quality of the Service and so that a Host can tell which enquiry came from Exploras.

• Any agreement you reach — price, date, meeting point, what is included, deposits, cancellation, refunds, insurance, liability — is between you and the Host only. Read the Host’s own conditions and get anything important confirmed in writing before you pay.
• Prices shown on the Service are indicative. They are provided by the Host or compiled by us from public information, and may be out of date, expressed per person or per group, and shown as “from” a minimum. Transport fares are the minimum for a small vehicle on that route. The price that binds you is the one the Host confirms to you.
• Availability shown or implied on the Service is not a reservation. Nothing is booked until the Host confirms it to you.
• Prices are displayed in US dollars for convenience. Hosts may accept Dominican pesos, cash, cards or transfers at their own rates; check with the Host.
• If a Host does not reply, you can contact another Host. We are not responsible for a Host’s silence, refusal, delay or performance.

4. Safety, risk and your own responsibility

Many of the experiences listed on the Service take place outdoors and in nature: on boats and at sea, on beaches, in rivers and waterfalls, on trails, in caves and mangroves, on the road and on motorised vehicles. These activities carry inherent risks, including weather and sea conditions, currents, falls, wildlife, road traffic, equipment failure and the limits of your own health and fitness. Some can result in serious injury or death.

• You decide whether an activity is suitable for you and the people you are travelling with, and you participate at your own risk.
• You are responsible for checking, directly with the Host, that it holds the licences, permits, insurance and qualifications that the activity requires (for example the permit for whale-watching boats, national-park access, driving licences and vehicle insurance) and for following the Host’s safety instructions.
• You are responsible for your own travel, health and accident insurance, for your travel documents and for complying with Dominican law during your stay.
• Exploras does not inspect vehicles, boats, equipment, premises or guides and gives no assurance about the safety, legality or quality of any experience.

5. Listings, information and content on the Service

Listings and Host profiles are created either by the Host or by Exploras from information the Host gave us or from publicly available sources such as the Host’s own website and Google Business Profile. We take reasonable care, but we do not verify every statement and we cannot promise that any listing is accurate, complete or current.

• “Verified” means that our team has spoken with the Host and that the Host’s page was complete at the time we checked it. It is not a guarantee of the Host’s licences, insurance, quality, safety or continued operation. We re-check periodically, and a badge can be stale.
• Ratings and review counts shown next to a Host come from Google and reflect what Google publishes about the Host’s business at the time of the request. We do not write, select, edit or verify them, and the text of a review belongs to its author.
• Parts of the Service are produced with automated tools: listing descriptions are translated into Spanish and French by machine, some descriptions are drafted from a Host’s public information, and blog articles are generated with artificial intelligence and edited by our team. If a translation differs from the English text, the English text governs, and the Host’s own confirmation governs over both.
• Where a listing has no exact duration, group size or price, the Service may show a typical range for that kind of activity. A range is an estimate, not a promise.
• Blog articles, guides and hub pages are general travel information. They are not professional, legal, medical or safety advice and may be out of date.
• Apart from the labelled “Sponsored” strip described in section 7.10, the order in which listings appear changes daily and is not paid placement. It is not a ranking of quality, and it is not a recommendation. On some category pages a business affiliated with the operator of Exploras may be shown first; that placement is disclosed here and is not paid for by any Host.

We may edit, translate, reorder, hide or remove any listing, profile, photo, article or other content at any time, with or without notice, and we are not obliged to publish anything.

6. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• use the Service for any unlawful purpose or in breach of these Terms;
• send Hosts enquiries that are false, misleading, abusive, or made for a purpose other than genuinely arranging an experience, or send Hosts marketing or spam;
• impersonate any person or business, or claim a listing that is not yours;
• copy, scrape, crawl, mirror or extract the directory, the listings, the Hosts’ contact details or any substantial part of the Service by automated means or for reuse in another product or database;
• interfere with the Service, probe or test its security, bypass rate limits or access controls, or upload malicious code;
• post content that is unlawful, defamatory, obscene, infringing, or that contains someone else’s personal data without their consent;
• use the Service to compete unfairly with Exploras or with a Host, or to divert Travellers away from a Host after obtaining their details through the Service.

We may investigate breaches, remove content, suspend accounts and listings, and inform the authorities where we consider it appropriate.

7. Terms for Hosts

This section applies to every business listed on the Service, whether the listing was created by the Host, by our team from information the Host gave us, or by our team from public sources. By keeping a listing on the Service, accepting a Traveller enquiry that identifies Exploras as its source, or asking us to publish or edit your page, you accept these Terms on behalf of your business. Hosts who use the host panel also accept the Host Agreement, which completes this section and whose Spanish version is binding for Hosts.

7.1 Listing is free. Exploras charges Hosts nothing to be listed and takes no commission on what Travellers pay you. Hosts may choose to buy the optional paid Plan Visibilidad described in section 7.10; a free basic listing remains available whether or not you do, and we will give at least 30 days’ notice before introducing any other paid feature. We may also decline, limit or remove any listing at our discretion.

7.2 Your warranties. You warrant, on an ongoing basis, that:

• your business is lawfully established and holds every licence, permit, registration, qualification and insurance that the activities you offer require under Dominican law, including for any vehicle, boat, guide or premises used;
• the information in your listing — descriptions, inclusions, prices, duration, group sizes, meeting points, requirements — is accurate and kept up to date, and that you will honour the prices and conditions you publish or promptly correct them;
• the WhatsApp number and other contact details on your page belong to your business and are monitored, and that you will respond to Traveller enquiries promptly and honestly;
• you own or hold the rights to every photo, logo, text and other material you provide or that appears on your page, and that publishing it on the Service infringes nobody’s rights;
• you deliver the experiences you list with reasonable care and skill, and in compliance with applicable law, including consumer-protection, tax, labour, environmental and safety rules;
• you will not use Traveller details obtained through the Service for anything other than answering that enquiry and providing the service requested.

7.3 Licence to us. You grant Exploras a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide licence to reproduce, display, crop, resize, translate, adapt and distribute the content on your page (including photos, logos and descriptions) on the Service, in search results and social previews, in our social-media accounts and in our marketing of the Service, for as long as your business is listed and for a reasonable period afterwards while cached copies expire. You confirm that you can grant this licence. The licence does not transfer ownership.

7.4 What we may do with your listing. We may create, edit, translate, complete, summarise, photograph, categorise, reorder, verify, re-verify, hide, suspend or remove your listing or profile at any time, including to correct errors, to keep the Service consistent, to comply with law or because we consider the listing unsuitable. We may display ratings and review counts that Google publishes about your business. We may contact you by WhatsApp, phone or email about your listing and about the quality of your service, and may ask you to answer short surveys.

7.5 Listings created from public information. If we listed your business before you asked us to, we did so from information you make public. You may ask us at any time to correct the listing, to take control of it or to remove it, by writing to our host support line or through the contact form; we will act within a reasonable time. Until then, section 7.2 applies to the information you have made public.

7.6 Traveller enquiries. Enquiries reach you directly from the Traveller on your own WhatsApp. We record which listing was contacted, when, and the details the Traveller chose to give us, so that we can measure the Service and follow up with you. We may ask you or the Traveller whether the enquiry received a reply and use the answer to improve the Service. A lack of reply does not affect where your listing appears.

7.7 Independence. Nothing in these Terms creates an employment, agency, partnership, franchise or joint-venture relationship between you and Exploras. You act in your own name and for your own account, you set your own prices and conditions, and you alone are responsible to Travellers, to the tax authorities and to any regulator.

7.8 Indemnity. You will indemnify and hold harmless Exploras, its operator, owners, staff and affiliates from any claim, loss, damage, fine, cost or expense (including reasonable legal fees) arising from the experiences you provide, from any breach of this section 7, from content you provided, or from a Traveller’s claim in connection with your business.

7.9 Leaving the Service. You may ask us to remove your listing at any time. We may keep records of past enquiries and edits as described in the Privacy Policy, and cached copies of your page may persist for a short period on third-party services after removal.

7.10 Plan Visibilidad (optional, paid). Hosts may subscribe to Plan Visibilidad for RD$1,990 per month per category, ITBIS included. While the plan is active, one of your listings may be shown as a single card in a strip labelled “Sponsored”, above the list on that category’s browse pages and on our guides that include one of your listings in that category, in English, Spanish and French. Each category takes at most four subscribers. The strip shows up to three of them, chosen afresh each day with equal chances, so your card may not appear on every page every day. The plan does not change your free listing, its position in the list or any badge. The free basic listing remains available (section 7.1).

7.11 Payment, renewal and cancellation. The plan is sold by Marvy & Mateo Inversiones, S.R.L. (RNC 1-32-93187-4), which issues the fiscal invoice (NCF) each month. Card payments are collected through Stripe on its behalf; payment by bank transfer is also possible by arrangement with us. A plan paid by card renews monthly until you cancel it. You can cancel at any time from your host panel, and the plan stays active until the end of the month already paid. If a renewal payment fails, the plan stays visible for up to 7 days while the payment is retried, then stops showing until it is paid. A plan paid by bank transfer ends at the end of the period paid for. A month already started is not refunded, except as described in section 7.13.

7.12 No guarantee of results. We do not promise any number of views, enquiries or bookings. We may change the price or the plan with 30 days’ notice by email; you may cancel before the change takes effect.

7.13 Ending a plan. We may end a plan if your listing is suspended or removed under these Terms or if we stop offering the plan. When we end a plan for either reason, we refund the unused part of the month pro rata.

8. Intellectual property and notices

The Service, its design, code, logos, the name Exploras, the compass mark, our texts, translations, photographs, articles, hub pages, data compilations and the selection and arrangement of the directory are owned by or licensed to the operator of Exploras and are protected by Dominican and international intellectual-property law. Except for browsing and for sharing links to pages of the Service, you may not reproduce, distribute, modify, create derivative works from, publicly display or commercially exploit any part of the Service without our prior written permission.

• Content supplied by Hosts remains theirs, subject to the licence in section 7.3. Photographs credited to a third party (for example on blog articles) remain the property of the credited photographer or agency and are used under licence.
• If you believe that content on the Service infringes your copyright, trademark, image rights or privacy, write to us through the contact form with the URL, a description of the right you hold and how it is infringed, your contact details and a statement that your notice is accurate and made in good faith. We will review the notice and, where justified, remove or disable access to the content and inform the Host who supplied it.

9. Third-party services

The Service relies on services run by other companies, each with its own terms and privacy policy: WhatsApp (Meta) for messaging with Hosts, Google for maps, business data and ratings, OpenStreetMap for map tiles, and the hosting, analytics and e-mail providers named in our Privacy Policy. When you tap a WhatsApp button you leave the Service and Meta’s terms apply. We are not responsible for the availability, content or conduct of any third-party service or of any website we link to.

10. No warranty

The Service is provided “as is” and “as available”. To the fullest extent permitted by law, we make no warranty of any kind, express or implied, about the Service or about any Host, listing, price, rating, translation, article or other content — including any warranty of accuracy, completeness, fitness for a particular purpose, merchantability, non-infringement, availability or uninterrupted or error-free operation. We may change, suspend or withdraw any part of the Service at any time.

11. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law:

• Exploras is not liable for any experience, transfer, rental, service or event provided by a Host, including for any personal injury, death, illness, loss of or damage to property, delay, cancellation, no-show, overcharge, misrepresentation, breach of contract or other act or omission of a Host or its staff.
• Exploras is not liable for anything that happens in a conversation, agreement or payment between a Traveller and a Host, or for any dispute between them.
• Exploras is not liable for reliance on any listing, price, availability, rating, review, translation, article or other content on the Service, or for its inaccuracy or omission.
• Exploras is not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive loss, or for any loss of profit, revenue, business, opportunity, data or goodwill, however arising, even if we were told it was possible.
• Our total aggregate liability to any person for all claims arising out of or relating to the Service in any twelve-month period shall not exceed the greater of one hundred US dollars (US$100) and the amounts that person paid to Exploras in that period (reservation deposits and plan fees).

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits any liability that cannot be excluded or limited under applicable law, including liability for fraud or for gross negligence or wilful misconduct on our part, or affects rights that consumers have under mandatory law (in the Dominican Republic, Law 358-05 on consumer protection) that cannot be waived by contract.

12. Your indemnity

You will indemnify and hold harmless Exploras, its operator, owners, staff and affiliates from any claim, loss, damage, cost or expense (including reasonable legal fees) arising from your breach of these Terms, your misuse of the Service, content you submit, or your dealings with a Host or a Traveller. Hosts give the additional indemnity in section 7.8.

13. Suspension and termination

We may suspend or end your access to all or part of the Service, close your account or remove your listing at any time, with or without notice, where we reasonably consider it necessary — including for breach of these Terms, at the request of an authority, or because we discontinue the Service. You may stop using the Service, close your account or ask us to remove your listing at any time. Sections 5, 7.3 (for the wind-down period), 7.8, 8, 10, 11, 12, 15 and 16 survive termination.

14. Your personal data

How we collect and use personal data — including the details you give when you contact a Host, the information in a Host’s page, cookies and analytics — is described in our Privacy Policy, which forms part of these Terms.

15. Changes to the Service and to these Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. The date at the top shows when they last changed. Changes take effect when posted on this page; for changes that materially reduce Hosts’ rights we will give at least 30 days’ notice by e-mail or WhatsApp to the contact on file where we have one. Your continued use of the Service after a change means you accept the updated Terms. If you do not accept them, stop using the Service and, if you are a Host, ask us to remove your listing.

16. Governing law and disputes

These Terms and any dispute arising out of or in connection with the Service are governed by the laws of the Dominican Republic, without regard to conflict-of-law rules.

• If you have a complaint, please tell us first through the contact form; we will try to resolve it with you in good faith within 30 days.
• Subject to the next point, the courts of the Distrito Nacional (Santo Domingo), Dominican Republic have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute.
• If you use the Service as a consumer and the mandatory law of your country of residence gives you the right to sue in your own courts or to rely on its consumer-protection rules, these Terms do not take that right away.

17. General

• These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy, are the entire agreement between you and Exploras about the Service and replace any earlier terms.
• If any provision is held invalid or unenforceable, it will be applied to the maximum extent permitted and the rest of the Terms remain in force.
• Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it.
• You may not assign or transfer your rights under these Terms. We may assign them to a successor of the Service, and will post notice here if we do.
• We are not liable for any failure or delay caused by events beyond our reasonable control, including hurricanes, storms, floods, power or network outages, acts of authority, epidemics or the failure of a third-party service.
• We may communicate with you through the Service, by e-mail, or by WhatsApp to a number you have given us.
• These Terms are published in English, Spanish and French. The English version is the binding one; the translations are provided for convenience and, if they differ, the English text prevails.

Questions about these Terms? Write to us through the contact form or to contacto@exploras.do. Hosts can also reach host support on WhatsApp at the number shown in the footer.