TroveStays All legal documents

Version 1.0.1 · Effective 2026-06-22 · Operated by Kindleye Limited (Hong Kong)

TroveStays — Terms and Conditions of Use

Please read these Terms carefully before using TroveStays. They form a legally binding contract between you and the company that operates TroveStays. If you do not accept these Terms, do not create an account and do not use TroveStays.

1. About TroveStays and these Terms

1.1 TroveStays is a travel platform (the "Platform") that (a) lets people who create travel and hotel content ("Creators") publish photos and short videos of hotels they have stayed at, and (b) lets people looking for a place to stay ("Travellers") discover those hotels and complete hotel bookings within the Platform. We refer to Creators, Travellers, and anyone else who uses the Platform together as "you" or "Users".

1.2 The Platform is operated by Kindleye Limited, a company incorporated in Hong Kong with Business Registration number 79777743 and registered office at 26 Square Street, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong ("TroveStays", "we", "us", or "our").

1.3 These Terms and Conditions of Use (these "Terms") govern your access to and use of the Platform, including the TroveStays mobile application, the TroveStays website (currently desktop and mobile web), any related application programming interfaces, and any associated services we make available (together, the "Service").

1.4 The following documents are part of these Terms and are incorporated by reference. By accepting these Terms you also accept each of them:

1.5 If there is any conflict between these Terms and any of the documents listed above, these Terms prevail, except that the Privacy Policy and the Personal Information Collection Statement prevail on matters of personal data.

1.6 We may update these Terms from time to time. Section 15 explains how that works.

2. Acceptance, eligibility, and your account

2.1 Acceptance. When you create a TroveStays account you will be asked to indicate that you have read and agree to these Terms. By ticking that box and submitting the form, by using the Service after these Terms have been brought to your attention, or by otherwise accepting these Terms electronically, you enter into a binding contract with us. You acknowledge that the Electronic Transactions Ordinance (Cap. 553 of the Laws of Hong Kong) gives this electronic acceptance the same effect as a written signature. We record the date, time, and version of the Terms you accepted as proof.

2.2 Eligibility. To use TroveStays you must be at least eighteen (18) years old and capable of forming a binding contract under the laws of Hong Kong and any other place where you use the Service. You warrant to us that this is the case. If we discover that an account belongs to someone under 18 we will suspend it and delete the associated personal data.

2.3 Account information. You must give us accurate, current, and complete information when you sign up, and you must keep that information accurate during the life of your account.

2.4 One account per person. You may hold only one account on TroveStays unless we agree otherwise in writing. You may not transfer your account to anyone else.

2.5 Account security. You are responsible for keeping your password confidential, for any device on which you stay signed in, and for everything that happens through your account. Tell us immediately at support@trovestays.com if you suspect any unauthorised use.

3. The role of the parties — what you are actually buying

3.1 This is one of the most important sections of these Terms. Please read it carefully.

3.2 TroveStays is a platform, not a hotel and not a travel agent in the traditional sense. We do not own, control, manage, operate, or supply any hotel, room, accommodation, food, transport, or other travel service. We provide a software platform that lets Creators share content and lets Travellers discover hotels and complete a booking.

3.3 Hotel inventory and the underlying booking are supplied through LiteAPI. When you choose a hotel and complete a booking on TroveStays, the underlying contract for your stay is between you and the hotel (the "Supplier"), arranged and processed by LiteAPI Travel Limited ("LiteAPI"), our hotel inventory and merchant-of-record partner. The Supplier's own terms (including its cancellation policy, taxes, mandatory fees, "due-at-property" amounts, and any house rules) are surfaced to you at the prebooking step and form part of that contract.

3.4 LiteAPI is the merchant of record for your booking. When you pay for a hotel through TroveStays, your card is charged by LiteAPI on behalf of the Supplier, using a payment widget provided by LiteAPI and supported by Stripe. Your card details are entered into a secure payment iframe; TroveStays does not see, store, or process your card number, expiry, or security code.

3.5 The contract for the Platform itself is between you and TroveStays under these Terms. That covers your use of the app and website, your account, your content, and the other things described in these Terms — but it does not make us a party to the contract for your stay with the Supplier, and it does not make us liable for what the Supplier does or fails to do at the hotel.

3.6 Travel-agent licensing. Where any licensing or regulatory authorisation is required of TroveStays in Hong Kong or elsewhere to operate the Platform, TroveStays will obtain and maintain it. If you have a question about our regulatory status, write to support@trovestays.com.

4. Pricing and payment

4.1 The price you see. The price displayed on the Platform for a hotel room is the price you will pay LiteAPI for the booking, expressed in your selected currency. That price is inclusive of (a) the Supplier's room rate, (b) Supplier-set mandatory taxes and fees that are payable in advance, and (c) our platform margin and LiteAPI's commission, which are bundled into the displayed price. We do not add a separate booking fee at the payment step.

4.2 What may not be included. Some Supplier-set amounts — for example resort fees, city or tourist taxes, parking charges, security deposits, or other "due-at-property" items — may not be included in the price you pay through TroveStays. Where this is the case it will be flagged at the prebooking step. Those amounts are owed to the Supplier directly and are not collected, refunded, or otherwise dealt with by TroveStays.

4.3 Price-lock at prebook. When you reach the payment step the price is locked for a short window so it cannot change while you complete payment. The amount you authorise on your card is the amount that will be charged. Our systems verify that the amount LiteAPI is about to charge matches the price you saw on screen; bookings that do not match are stopped.

4.4 Currency. Where you choose a currency that is not the Supplier's settlement currency, the conversion is performed by LiteAPI and/or your card issuer. Your card issuer may add its own foreign-exchange or cross-border fees, which are outside our control.

4.5 Receipts and invoices. Your booking confirmation in the app, and the email confirmation sent to the email address on the booking, serves as your receipt. If you need a different format of invoice (for example for company expense reporting) write to support@trovestays.com; we will do our best to obtain it from LiteAPI or the Supplier.

4.6 Chargebacks. Initiating a chargeback with your card issuer rather than first contacting us, LiteAPI, or the Supplier may slow down resolution and, in some cases, lead us to suspend your account while the dispute is investigated. Please give us a chance to fix the problem first — contact support@trovestays.com.

5. Cancellation, amendment, and refunds

5.1 The full detail of how cancellations and refunds work is in our Cancellation and Refund Policy (08-cancellation-and-refund.md), which is part of these Terms. This Section is a summary of the key points.

5.2 Two rate types. When you book a hotel through TroveStays, the Supplier's rate is either:

The rate type, the free-cancellation deadline (if any), and the cancellation charges that apply to your specific booking are shown to you before you pay.

5.3 How to cancel. You cancel a booking through the booking detail screen in the TroveStays app. A cancellation, once submitted, is sent to LiteAPI and the Supplier and may not be reversible.

5.4 Refunds. Where the Supplier and LiteAPI agree that a refund is due, it is processed by LiteAPI back to the card you originally paid with. Refunds typically arrive within three to five (3–5) business days of the cancellation being confirmed by the Supplier, although your card issuer may take longer in some cases.

5.5 Due-at-property amounts. Anything you have not yet paid because it is "due-at-property" is not refunded by TroveStays because it was never paid to LiteAPI or TroveStays in the first place.

5.6 Cancellation by the Supplier. If a Supplier cancels or cannot honour your booking, LiteAPI will normally refund your payment and (where applicable) offer compensation. TroveStays will help you with that process but is not itself the party that owes you a refund — the contract for the stay is between you and the Supplier, with LiteAPI as merchant of record.

5.7 Amendments. Some bookings can be amended (for example, dates changed) before check-in, subject to Supplier rules and any difference in price. The booking detail screen will tell you whether amendment is possible for your rate.

6. Content and conduct

6.1 The Platform shows you content (photos, short videos, captions, comments, and ratings) submitted by other Users, mostly Creators. TroveStays does not edit or pre-approve this content beyond a technical quality check on videos (resolution, orientation, duration, and codec).

6.2 Be sensible about what you see. Other Users' opinions are their own. A Creator's recommendation is not advice from TroveStays and we do not warrant that any hotel shown on the Platform will meet your expectations.

6.3 Your conduct. When you use the Platform — whether you post content, leave a comment, like or save a post, book a stay, or simply browse — you must comply with our Acceptable Use Policy (05-acceptable-use-policy.md). The Acceptable Use Policy lists the things you must not do (such as posting illegal or infringing content, harassing other Users, or scraping the Platform). Breaching the Acceptable Use Policy is a breach of these Terms.

6.4 Reporting content. If you believe content on the Platform breaches the Acceptable Use Policy, please report it through the in-app reporting tool or by emailing support@trovestays.com. If your report relates to copyright or another intellectual-property right, please follow the Copyright and IP Takedown Policy (07-copyright-and-ip-takedown.md).

6.5 Our removal and suspension rights. We may remove content, restrict its visibility, or suspend or terminate accounts that breach these Terms or the Acceptable Use Policy. We will normally tell you what we have done and why, except where doing so would be unlawful, would jeopardise an investigation, or would put another person at risk.

7. Your content — the licence you give us

7.1 You keep ownership. Photos, videos, captions, comments, ratings, and any other material that you submit to the Platform ("Your Content") remain your property (or the property of whoever you got them from with the right to use them). We do not claim ownership of Your Content.

7.2 The licence you give us. When you submit Your Content to the Platform, you grant TroveStays and our successors and assigns a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable licence to host, store, copy, transmit, format, transcode, adapt for technical delivery, publish, publicly display and perform, communicate to the public, and distribute Your Content on and in connection with the Platform and the promotion of the Platform. This licence lasts for as long as Your Content is on the Platform plus a short tail for cached, archival, and backup copies (typically up to 90 days after deletion). It survives the termination of your account to that limited extent.

7.3 The licence is limited. We will not sell Your Content as a standalone product, license it to third parties as a content library, or use it in a way that materially misrepresents you. We may, however, use Your Content (or excerpts) in our own marketing of the Platform — for example in advertisements, social-media posts, app-store listings, and press materials — provided we do so consistently with the way you originally posted it.

7.4 Your warranties about Your Content. When you submit Your Content you warrant to us that:

7.5 What happens if you delete Your Content. When you delete a post, comment, or other piece of Your Content, we remove it from public view within a reasonable time. Copies may persist for a short period in caches, backups, and audit logs, and any copies that have already been viewed, shared, or downloaded by other Users are outside our control.

8. Bookings made through Creator content (attribution)

8.1 Some Travellers find and book hotels because of a Creator's post. Where that happens, we attribute the booking to the Creator and pay the Creator a commission on the booking. The detailed rules — including the rate, the holdback period, payout timing, the USD 100 payout floor, and how refunds and clawbacks work — are in the Creator Agreement (04-creator-agreement.md).

8.2 Anti-fraud. Attribution and commission are set on our server side from your actual booking activity. A Traveller cannot manipulate attribution by editing a request. A Creator who books their own posted hotel is flagged as a self-booking and earns no commission on it.

8.3 As a Traveller, none of this changes the price you pay — the commission economics are between TroveStays, LiteAPI, and the Creator.

9. Reviews and ratings

9.1 After a stay you may be asked to rate or review the hotel. If you do, the rating and any text you submit are stored by us for the purposes set out in the Privacy Policy, which include analysing the quality of hotels on the Platform and ranking content. Your individual review is not displayed to other Users at the date of these Terms; if that changes in the future, we will update the Privacy Policy and Section 7 of these Terms before doing so.

9.2 If your review would otherwise have been used in a public way and you do not want it to be, contact support@trovestays.com to ask us to delete it.

10. Disclaimers

10.1 Service "as is" and "as available". Subject to clauses 10.4 and 11.4, the Platform is provided to you "as is" and "as available". We do not warrant that the Platform will be uninterrupted, error-free, secure, free of viruses or other harmful components, or that any defect will be corrected.

10.2 Third-party content and information. We do not warrant the accuracy, completeness, suitability, or currency of (a) hotel descriptions, photographs, room types, amenities, ratings, prices, or availability supplied by Suppliers or LiteAPI; (b) content submitted by Creators or other Users; or (c) any other information on the Platform that originates from a third party. Hotels and room types are described by their Suppliers, not by us.

10.3 No professional advice. Nothing on the Platform is travel, legal, medical, financial, or other professional advice. You are responsible for deciding whether a hotel is suitable for your trip.

10.4 What we do NOT exclude. Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits, and we expressly do not seek to exclude or limit:

11. Limitation of liability

11.1 The limitations in this Section apply to the maximum extent permitted by law, subject always to clause 10.4.

11.2 Types of loss we do not pay for. To the maximum extent permitted by law, we are not liable to you for:

11.3 Aggregate cap. Subject to clauses 10.4 and 11.4, our total aggregate liability to you, however arising (whether in contract, tort including negligence, breach of statutory duty, restitution, or otherwise) and in any twelve-month period, is limited to the greater of:

11.4 What this cap does not apply to. The cap in clause 11.3 does not apply to anything within clause 10.4, to your indemnity obligations under Section 12, or to any liability that cannot lawfully be capped.

11.5 Reasonableness. Each part of this Section 11 is intended to be reasonable having regard to the nature of the Platform, the price you pay us, the alternatives available, and our respective bargaining positions, as required by section 3 of the Control of Exemption Clauses Ordinance (Cap. 71). If any part is held to be unreasonable, it is to be read down to the maximum extent that is reasonable; if it cannot be read down, it is severed under Section 17.

12. Indemnity by you

12.1 You agree to indemnify and hold TroveStays, our affiliates, and our and their officers, directors, employees, and agents (each an "Indemnified Person") harmless from and against any claim, demand, action, loss, damage, fine, penalty, cost, or expense (including reasonable legal fees) brought by a third party against an Indemnified Person and arising out of or in connection with:

12.2 If you are a consumer, your obligations under this Section 12 are limited to losses that you caused intentionally, recklessly, or through serious fault, and are subject to the same overall financial cap that limits our liability to you under clause 11.3 (with the cap measured here as the greater of HKD 1,000 and the total amount you have paid us in the twelve months before the claim). This is for fairness in line with the Unconscionable Contracts Ordinance (Cap. 458).

12.3 If you are a Creator acting in the course of a business or trade (including the business of producing content for reward), the obligations under this Section 12 are uncapped in respect of (a) third-party intellectual-property claims arising from Your Content, (b) claims arising from your breach of any warranty in clause 7.4, and (c) claims under any sanctions, anti-money-laundering, or counter-terrorism-financing law. The detail is in the Creator Agreement.

13. Suspension and termination

13.1 By you. You can stop using the Platform at any time, and you can delete your account from the Profile screen or by emailing support@trovestays.com. Some information must be retained after deletion for legal, accounting, fraud-prevention, or audit reasons — that is described in the Privacy Policy.

13.2 By us. We may suspend your access to part or all of the Platform, restrict the visibility of Your Content, or terminate your account if:

13.3 Notice. We will normally give you reasonable notice and an opportunity to fix the problem before we suspend or terminate your account, except where (a) immediate action is necessary to protect the Platform or other Users, (b) we are required by law not to give notice, or (c) the breach is incapable of being fixed.

13.4 Effect of termination. When your account ends:

14. Force majeure

14.1 We are not in breach of these Terms, and we are not liable to you, for any failure or delay in performing our obligations under these Terms caused by an event outside our reasonable control. Those events include (without limitation): acts of God; natural disasters (earthquake, fire, flood); pandemic, epidemic, or public-health emergency; war, civil unrest, terrorism, or sabotage; government action, order, embargo, or sanction; strike or other industrial action affecting us or our suppliers; failure of telecommunications, electricity, banking, payment-card networks, Internet exchanges, hosting providers, content-delivery networks, or other infrastructure; failure or outage of LiteAPI, Stripe, Mux, Supabase, our identity providers, or other essential third-party services we use; and any failure or refusal of a Supplier to honour a booking.

14.2 If a force-majeure event continues for more than thirty (30) days, either of us may terminate the contract between us on notice.

15. Changes to these Terms

15.1 We may amend these Terms from time to time. Reasons we might do so include: changes in the law; changes in the way the Service works; the launch of new features; changes in the way LiteAPI, Stripe, Mux, or other partners operate; and changes to our pricing model.

15.2 For material changes, we will give you at least fourteen (14) days' notice before the change takes effect, by an in-app banner, an email to the address on your account, or both. For non-material changes (typographical corrections, clarifications that do not change rights or obligations) we may make the change immediately and update the version line at the top of these Terms.

15.3 If you do not accept a material change, you can close your account before the change takes effect; if you continue to use the Service after the change takes effect, you are taken to have accepted it.

15.4 We keep a record of the version of these Terms you accepted at signup and at each material change, so we can show, if you ask, what was in force when you used the Service.

16. Governing law and dispute resolution

16.1 Governing law. These Terms, and any non-contractual obligation arising out of or in connection with them, are governed by the laws of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

16.2 First step — talk to us. If you are unhappy with something, please write to us at support@trovestays.com first and give us a reasonable chance to resolve it. Most disputes can be resolved that way.

16.3 Courts (Travellers / consumers). Subject to clause 16.4, you and TroveStays submit to the non-exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region for any dispute arising out of or in connection with these Terms. "Non-exclusive" means that Hong Kong is the primary forum but that, where the law gives you a right to bring proceedings somewhere else (for example in the place you live), nothing in these Terms takes that right away. Hong Kong consumers retain the right to bring a claim before the Small Claims Tribunal for any matter within its jurisdictional limit.

16.4 Arbitration option (Creators / businesses). If you are using the Platform as a Creator in the course of a business or trade, or if your claim is for more than HKD 500,000, either of us may elect that the dispute be resolved by arbitration in Hong Kong under the Hong Kong International Arbitration Centre (HKIAC) Administered Arbitration Rules in force at the time, by a single arbitrator, in English. The arbitration is confidential. This clause does not stop either of us from seeking interim or urgent relief from a court.

16.5 No class actions. To the maximum extent permitted by law, you and TroveStays each waive any right to participate in a class, collective, or representative proceeding against the other.

17. General

17.1 Notices to you. We will send notices to you by in-app message, push notification, or to the email address on your account. It is your responsibility to keep your email address up to date.

17.2 Notices to us. Notices to us under these Terms must be in writing in English and sent to support@trovestays.com (with a copy to our registered office at 26 Square Street, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong).

17.3 Assignment. You may not assign, transfer, or sub-contract any of your rights or obligations under these Terms without our prior written consent. We may assign or transfer our rights and obligations to a successor in a corporate transaction (sale, merger, reorganisation, or transfer of substantially all our assets), provided your rights are not materially diminished.

17.4 Severability. If any clause (or part of a clause) of these Terms is held to be invalid, illegal, or unenforceable, it is to be read down to the minimum extent necessary to make it valid; if that is not possible, it is to be severed from these Terms, and the rest of these Terms continues in full force.

17.5 No waiver. A failure or delay by us in enforcing any provision of these Terms is not a waiver of our right to enforce it later.

17.6 Entire agreement. These Terms, together with the documents listed in clause 1.4, are the entire agreement between you and us about your use of the Service, and they replace any earlier agreement, understanding, representation, or arrangement about the same subject matter. You confirm that you have not relied on any representation, statement, or assurance not set out in these Terms.

17.7 No third-party rights. A person who is not a party to these Terms has no right under the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Ordinance (Cap. 623) or otherwise to enforce or enjoy the benefit of any provision of these Terms.

17.8 Language. The English-language version of these Terms is the version that has legal effect. We may publish translations for your convenience, but in the case of any difference between the English version and a translation, the English version prevails.

17.9 Relationship. Nothing in these Terms makes you and TroveStays partners, joint venturers, employer and employee, principal and agent, or franchisor and franchisee.

17.10 Survival. Any provision of these Terms which by its nature should survive termination — including Sections 7.2 (limited tail), 9.1, 10, 11, 12, 13.4, 16, and 17 — survives termination.

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Version history

Version Date Notes
1.0 2026-06-11 Initial public version.