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Explore Kingston

The story

About Explore Kingston

This site is a community project, built with the Greater Kingston Chamber of Commerce by people who live here. It's free to use and free of ads — no sponsored placements, no pay-to-rank listings. If it's on the site, it's because it's useful.

Why your visit counts

Washington adds a small lodging tax to hotel and short-term-rental stays, and state law (chapter 67.28 RCW) sends that money back into tourism — festivals, trails, marketing, visitor facilities. Any group that receives those dollars must report real visitor numbers to the state's auditors (JLARC): how many came, how many traveled 50+ miles, how many stayed overnight in paid lodging.

Kingston is unincorporated, so our share flows through Kitsap County's Lodging Tax Advisory Committee — which gives priority to unincorporated communities like ours. Good counts are how Kingston's small nonprofits win the grants that pay for the events and trails you came here to enjoy. That's the whole reason we ask this one quick, anonymous question:

Want the fine print? Read RCW 67.28.1816 (the reporting law) or visit the Kitsap County LTAC page.

What we track (and what we don't)

We keep

  • Anonymous visit counts — which pages get viewed, the rough region a connection comes from (never your precise location), and which local-business links get tapped, like menus, ordering, maps, and bookings.
  • Anonymous survey answers, counted only in aggregate — distance band, day trip or overnight, nights stayed. The survey is optional; never tied to a person or device.
  • Device location, only when you tap a location feature (like “what's open near me”) — always behind the browser's permission prompt, and we store only the neighborhood it falls in (like “Village Green”), never a coordinate. Rounded coordinates recorded before this change are being purged.
  • When you post a photo at a scavenger-hunt stop, that photo and its location go to the hunt organizers at the Chamber so they can confirm the find. It's the one thing the app sends on your behalf — don't include anything you wouldn't want them to see.
  • That's it. Really.

We never do

  • No accounts or sign-ins — nothing here needs one.
  • No cookies for tracking, no ad tech, and nothing is ever sold to anyone.
  • No location coordinates stored for analytics, ever — outside the opt-in location features above, we only see the rough region a connection comes from, and even opted-in pings are kept only as a named-neighborhood count. We also never record visits to food or health assistance resources.
  • No hidden uploads — the app only sends something you made when you deliberately post a scavenger-hunt photo (see left).

The short version

We count visits, not visitors — anonymous aggregates only, in support of the lodging-tax grant reporting described above. The state needs totals; nobody needs your data.

The full, versioned details — including our My Health My Data Act posture, the retention schedule, and how to see or delete your data — are on our privacy page, the normative version of everything summarized here.

Data sources & thanks

The live info on this site comes straight from the folks who run things. Thanks to:

For local businesses & nonprofits

Get listed

Run a Kingston business or want your event on the calendar? Email the Chamber at info@kingstonchamber.com — listings are free.

Restaurants

Menu or hours changed? Send the Chamber your new link and we'll update your listing — visitors trust the site because it's current.

Nonprofits

Planning a fundraiser? Check the shared community calendar first so events don't collide, and post your volunteer needs there too.

Lodging-tax grants

Kitsap County runs a lodging-tax grant round each year (typically in the fall) and prioritizes unincorporated communities like Kingston — confirm dates on the Kitsap County LTAC page.