Terms and Conditions
Effective date: 16th December 2025
These terms and conditions cover your interaction with the Cicerone website and with the Cicerone mobile application operated by Cicerone Press Ltd (“us”, “we”, or “our”).
Please read these Terms and Conditions carefully before using our website or our Cicerone mobile application.
Your access to and use of our website or mobile application is conditioned on your acceptance of and compliance with these terms and conditions. The terms and conditions apply to all visitors, users and others who access or use our website or mobile application.
By accessing or using our website or mobile application, you agree to be bound by these terms and conditions. If you disagree with any part of the terms and conditions, then you may not access our website or mobile application. We reserve the right to change these terms at any time.
Buying
We sell you the product at the price listed on the website and deliver it to you as soon as possible. For orders outside the UK, we add a small postal charge.
You may be asked to provide certain information relevant to your purchase, such as your credit or debit card number, its expiration date, your billing address, and your shipping information.
If you place your order with us over the phone, we may also ask for the security number on your credit or debit card to process your payment and complete your order.
We reserve the right to refuse or cancel your order at any time.
Payment
We accept Visa, Mastercard, Switch/Maestro cards through our secure payment provider, Stripe. These card transactions are certified as secure by Instant SSL. All transactions take place on a secure server.
We also accept payment via PayPal or Apple Pay.
This means that Cicerone does not and will not have your credit card information, which is why we cannot save your payment information – everything is done through specialist secure payment providers.
Price changes
Cicerone may amend the prices across our products at any time. In the case of a subscription price change, you will be notified of the change in advance of your next billing cycle and you’ll have the opportunity to cancel your subscription before further payment is taken.
Returns
Cicerone has a 60-day no-quibble returns policy for printed products and a 30-day no-quibble returns policy for digital products, which means that if you’re not satisfied with what you ordered, return it to us in an unused condition with a note of your contact details. We’ll arrange a refund or exchange it for an alternative product. For overseas orders, if you’d prefer not to pay for return postage, we may be able to offer a discount voucher toward a new purchase instead. Please contact us for more details.
If there were any lack of clarity in our catalogues or website about the guide’s content, we’d appreciate your feedback to help us improve.
Privacy
We keep all your information confidential and do not sell or share it with anyone. View details of our Privacy Policy.
Shipping method
In the UK, orders of up to four items are sent through Royal Mail. Orders for five or more books are sent by courier, usually DPD. This is a signed-for service to ensure safe delivery, the same standard we would use for a trade customer. We will provide you with parcel tracking information as soon as it is available, so you can tweak delivery arrangements if needed. We appreciate that this can be a bit fiddly, and it is hard for you to be in, but we have found it’s the best way to ensure deliveries of larger parcels reach you.
All orders are sent out as soon as possible, but no later than 48 hours. Please note that our warehouse, BookSource, which helps us with storage and shipping, generally doesn’t work on Saturdays, Sundays, or Bank Holidays, and is closed over the Christmas and New Year break.
UK orders should arrive in three working days or fewer.
European orders should arrive in 10 working days, but sometimes postal services are slow so this could be as long as 20 working days. If it’s longer, please get in touch, and we will see if we can follow up from our end. We do not use a full tracking service.
For the rest of the world, please allow up to 30 working days.
Shipping costs
Orders to UK addresses are sent by Royal Mail 48 for all orders through the website. We make no postal charge.
For Europe, we do make a small postal charge of £3.50 per book.
For the rest of the world, the postal charges are £5.50 per book. These charges reflect our actual postage costs.
Discounts
Discount codes will not apply to items already on sale and only one discount code can be used per order.
Countries we cannot reach
Unfortunately, after the bitter experience of credit card payment problems and the failure to deliver books, we have, with reluctance and regret, concluded that we cannot offer a reliable service to some countries.
This list will change from time to time, but right now includes Russia, Palestine, North Korea (not that we have received many orders from there), Israel, and South Africa.
This irritates us almost as much as it must irritate you. Our apologies, but in these cases we cannot offer a service we consider acceptable, so we must ask you to buy Cicerone guides from another internet retailer.
Taxes and duties
There is no UK VAT on print or digital sales. Strictly speaking, they are zero-rated, i.e. the VAT is calculated at 0%.
For VAT in EU countries, see below. For the rest of the world, there is no VAT on our exported sales.
VAT in EU countries
Under new rules from mid-2021, we are required to add VAT at the relevant rate for each EU country. This is applied at checkout when we know the delivery location, or, for an eBook or app access purchase, the purchaser’s home address, depending on whether it is a book, an eBook, or app access. VAT rates vary.
VAT is also applied to shipping costs, but not on any donations made to support our charity partners. Each parcel is stickered with Cicerone’s EU VAT number (we are registered in France). This means that the book should be sent straight to you without any taxes or customs duties added, but if they are it is almost certainly being done wrongly so please let us know.
Duties and customer charges are the responsibility of the country to which the books are being sent. Usually there are no such charges, but if there are it is the responsibility of the purchaser.
Maximum value per order
The maximum value per order for orders outside the UK is €150 (roughly £120 or 6-8 books). This is to comply with EU VAT rules and to ensure parcels are below customs thresholds. This is also applied to all international orders so if things go astray (which can unfortunately happen) the damage isn’t too bad.
Data accuracy
At Cicerone, we do our best to ensure the information in our books, eBooks and app access products is as up to date as possible. However, trail conditions can change, and routes can be amended, so we cannot guarantee that the information will always be accurate.
The activities we describe in our books, eBooks and app access products can at times involve risk of injury, death, property damage, and other dangers. Unfortunately, we cannot and do not assume responsibility for any such incident resulting from your use of our products. So please be safe and look after yourselves!
Website and mobile application accounts
When you set up a Cicerone website account or a mobile application account, you’ll need to use an up-to-date email address and set a secure password. It is your responsibility to safeguard the password and ensure you don’t pass it on to anyone else. Please let us know as soon as possible if you are aware of a security breach or unauthorised access to your account.
If you breach any of the terms of our website or mobile application, we may terminate or suspend your accounts without notice.
If you would like to terminate your accounts, please let us know, and we can do this for you.
Intellectual property
All the content on the Cicerone website and in our products is the exclusive property of Cicerone Press Ltd or our authors. This means you cannot share the information with third parties unless we give you written permission to do so.
Links to other websites
Our website and mobile application may contain links to other websites or services that we don’t own or control. Therefore, we aren’t responsible for the content, privacy policies, or practices of these sites, and we’d recommend you read the terms and conditions of the sites you visit.
About BookSource
BookSource is Cicerone’s distribution partner. BookSource is a professional book distributor based in Glasgow. We keep our books in their warehouse, all our orders go to them, they pack and post our books to you, and send all payments to us. Your internet order will go directly to them and they will send it straight to you. You can imagine how useful this service is to us.
We do this for two main reasons.
Firstly, so we can be sure to give all our customers the best possible professional service, however large or small they may be.
Secondly, so we can concentrate on the work of publishing high quality guides, keeping them up to date and accurate, and telling all our customers and users about them.
BookSource issues its invoicing documentation for us. Don’t let this worry you at all – they are doing it on our behalf. In terms of privacy, BookSource and ourselves hold all your information totally confidentially, and solely for the purposes of processing your order.
Find out more about BookSource.
Contact us
If you have any questions about these terms and conditions, please contact us.