Prices in Turkish Lira (₺ TRY) and Euros (€ EUR) are approximate and for orientation only.
Overview
TurkeyStarter (https://turkeystarter.com) needs no user accounts, and we do not sell personal data. The interactive calculators (TCDD YHT Rail Calculator, Museum Pass Calculator, Istanbulkart Calculator, Lira Converter, Checklist, and Phrasebook) do their calculations in your browser.
Visit counting
When you open a page, your browser sends our own counter the page path and the referring page; when you click a link to another page on this site, it sends that link's path. From this we keep daily totals of page views, pages viewed, referring sites, countries (from the country code supplied by our host), device type (derived from the browser's user agent), hour of the visit and number of link clicks, plus a list of the last 50 page views (time, path, country, device type, referring site). To count unique visitors we use a one-way hash of the date, IP address and user agent, shortened to 16 characters (at most 5,000 per day); for the count of visitors in the last few minutes we use a separate 12-character hash of the same data, which is deleted after 10 minutes. The raw IP address and user agent are not stored. Visits from known bots and automated tools (recognised by their user agent) are not counted. The daily totals and unique-visitor hashes have no automatic expiry, the daily click counts are kept for about 400 days, and the statistics are shown only on a private page.
Contact form
When you write to us through the contact form, we receive the name, email address and message you enter, and the message is emailed to [email protected]. A backup copy is kept for 90 days. To limit spam, the form only accepts messages sent from turkeystarter.com and allows up to 5 messages per hour from one connection, counted with a one-way hash of the IP address that is deleted after about an hour; the raw IP address is not stored.
Cookies and local storage
This website sets no cookies, neither its own nor third-party cookies; our visit counting works without them, even though the cookie banner mentions analytics. When you click a button in the cookie banner, your browser saves your choice (accepted or declined) in its local storage under the key cookie-consent. This value stays on your device and does not switch anything on or off; you can remove it by clearing this site's data in your browser. This website also uses Cloudflare Web Analytics, which, according to Cloudflare, does not use any client-side state, such as cookies or localStorage, to collect usage metrics and does not fingerprint individuals via their IP address, User Agent string or any other data (see Cloudflare's privacy policy). The Lira Converter loads daily reference exchange rates from our own server, which gets them from ExchangeRate-API; your browser does not contact ExchangeRate-API directly.
Contact
Content on TurkeyStarter (https://turkeystarter.com) links to official Turkish sources such as GoTürkiye, TCDD Taşımacılık, Müzekart (muze.gov.tr), and İBB Metro İstanbul. Prices, timetables and entry rules change, so always confirm them with the official source before you travel. Email us at [email protected].