Security
ARES Travel and the ARES Travel Network, powered by Advanced Reservation Systems, Inc. (ARES), assure the security of your online purchases.
Security is an absolute priority at ARES. To safeguard your personal information, our systems are equipped with multiple security precautions throughout the booking process, and long after you’ve completed your transaction. Our systems are protected by firewalls that act as shields to our computer networks. Within those systems, sensitive information is encrypted (a sophisticated way of scrambling information so it cannot be decoded) to protect your personal data, like credit card numbers. ARES uses the latest encryption technology to ensure that every transaction is safe.
The ARES technology team continually monitors our systems and our servers are housed in a secured facility with very strict access controls. All personally identifiable and private data is transmitted securely to the ARES systems using industry standard SSL encryption. Any further transmittal of the data that is necessary, for instance for completing a credit card transaction via payment gateway, is also secured via SSL or GPG encryption. ARES uses high level security in data retention and storage. This includes the encryption and storage of cardholder data, the most sensitive of stored data. All cardholder data is stored in encrypted form and access to the servers on which data resides is controlled by both physical and logical security.
Data access is strictly controlled and personally identifiable customer data is never shared with third parties. For reservations only in which deferred payment is required, ARES will forward only the customer's cardholder data necessary to complete the transaction via a secure channel (SSL or GPG encrypted). In the course of regular business, certain internal accounting staff may be required to have access to cardholder data. This access is only available via special authorization, and it is not possible to configure user accounts to access card holder data from within the administrative application. At all times, even when viewing non-cardholder data, access and transfer of data is restricted to SSL secured access only.
ARES does not allow Customer Service Representatives to view authorization codes, AVS, CID response or payment/settlement status as it relates to credit card payments. Our secure server software encrypts all of your personal information, including credit card information. The process of encryption takes the information you enter and converts it into bits of code that are securely transmitted over the Internet. This scrambled data cannot be read as the information travels over the Internet.
If you are more comfortable providing your credit card number over the phone, you can call our reservations center seven days a week with your credit card information using the designated toll free number located on ARES Travel or any of the travel related websites throughout the ARES Travel Network.
