Privacy Policy - Coastal Holidays

It is used to inform our website visitors of just how protected their personal information is when they visit our site.

About this policy and who we are

Coastal Holidays are committed to protecting and preserving your privacy when you visit our website or communicate with us electronically, and this policy explains how we collect, use, share and protect your personal data.

We are responsible for the collection and proper management of any personal information you submit. We will keep your personal details secure and use the information you provide consistently with applicable privacy and data protection laws and the terms of this Privacy Policy. We are also legally obliged to use your information in line with current legislation covering the protection of personal information, including the Data Protection Act 1998.

This policy covers guests who use our company website to book a holiday or look for a holiday and owners who let their properties with Coastal Holidays. Please note that our customers and owners must be over the age of 18 and we do not, therefore, collect personal information from children.

We monitor and review our privacy policy regularly and will publish any changes on this web page. This policy was last updated on 4 May 2018. By using the website, you agree to be bound by this policy.

Personal information we collect

In running and operating the website, we may collect and process the following information:

Identification: name, title, date of birth, age/age range, gender, location
Contact details: postal addresses, phone numbers, email addresses
Account login details: email address, password (which is stored in encrypted form)
Bookings: property booked, holiday check in/check out dates, cost of the holiday, amounts paid, limited details of other people booked on the same holiday (names, gender, age range)
Marketing preferences: whether you wish to receive marketing information from us, and if so, by which methods (postal, email, telephone, SMS)
Payment: method, the last four digits of card numbers, payment card expiry date, amounts collected, third party payment service provider references. Please note that we do not capture or store your full card details: payment is handled by our payment service providers (see below)
Browsing: historical searches, how you use our website and mobile apps, website experience user survey responses, the devices and IP addresses you use to access our services (operating system, browser). We collect this information so that we can continuously improve our website and our service to you
Holiday experience: any feedback you leave, responses to customer satisfaction surveys, whether you have a pet, interests (e.g. preferred holiday type such as holidays near dog friendly beaches)
Specific to property owners: addresses of your properties, historical and future booking information, photographs/videos of the properties you own
Communication: web chat messages, emails, customer service matters, responses to questionnaires, competition entries, your interaction with our marketing communications (clicking links in our marketing emails, for example – we track this to help ensure our communications are relevant and interesting)
Electronic identifiers: cookies, IP addresses. These electronic identifiers are essential to enable you to log into your online account and to assist you if you encounter difficulties using our online services. You can disable cookies if you wish, but this will hamper our ability to provide online services securely

How we collect personal information

We collect information in several ways, as follows:

From you – via the completion of forms on our website, or through contact via e-mail, social media, phone or in person
Your use of our website
Third party holiday providers you may book with, who advertise our properties
Your interaction with our marketing communications
Third party review services including UpFront
Like many companies, when you visit our website we also collect information about usage via cookies, and we also track user and traffic patterns; however, we do not collect personal information via cookies. More information on our use of cookies is detailed below.

How we use your personal information

We use your personal information to:

Manage your holiday booking
Manage your online account
If you are an owner, undertake holiday letting agency activities on your behalf
Understand how to improve our services, to select and advise upon the best holiday properties to match your requirements and to provide the most relevant information and offers to you
Detect and prevent fraud or abuse of our services
Enable the display of the most appropriate adverts on our websites and on other websites and services where we place advertising
Communicate with you, including responding to your emails, messages on social media, web chat requests and handling customer service issues
Process your payments
With your permission, send you relevant marketing information such as details of special offers and new properties we think will be of interest to you
Manage competitions, promotions and special offers in which you participate
Make sure our servers and websites are operating correctly

Legal basis of processing

There are several grounds on which we will store and use your data, as follows:

Consent: for certain types of data processing (e.g. marketing activities), we rely on your consent to use your data. You may withdraw your consent at any time (see Your rights below)
Bookings: much of the time, our use of your data will be because of the holiday booking we manage on your behalf. We will usually retain relevant data for up to six years from the date the booking completes – usually the last day of your holiday.
Legal obligations: we are under certain binding legal obligations, such as accounting to the government for tax and making financial records available for audit. In such cases, we are typically obliged to retain data for up to seven years from the date of the transaction.
Legitimate interests: we use data to manage our operations and to make business process improvements. However we will always ensure that our legitimate interests will never override your right to privacy.

How we share your personal information

We give some of your contact information to property owners, so they can get in contact with you regarding, for example, key collection. (We also give you their contact details, for the same reason).

However, we would note the following:

We store your data in certain cloud services provided by third parties. Those third parties do not however have access to your data.
We do not transfer your data outside the UK or the European Union.

Any personal information we collect is only used by Coastal Holidays. We do not share personal data with any other third parties, other than noted above, unless we are required to do so by law.

Security of your data

We protect your data with various technology-based systems. We also regularly test and evaluate the security of our systems, updating safeguards as necessary. Our staff are trained in the importance of security and privacy and we treat breaches of confidentiality and privacy as disciplinary matters.

We have a system of retention periods in place to ensure that your information is only stored whilst it is required for the relevant purposes or to meet legal requirements. Where your information is no longer required, we will ensure it is disposed of or deleted in a secure manner.

Your rights

We generally use your data either on the basis of your consent or as a result of a holiday booking which you have placed with us. You have the right to withdraw your consent. All our marketing communications include an unsubscribe link, to make it easy to withdraw consent. If you have an online account with us, you may also log into our website to manage your marketing preferences.

If you withdraw your consent (e.g. by opting out of marketing communications), we will stop processing your data as requested. Please bear in mind that if you have a holiday booked and you have not yet travelled, we will still need to hold onto your data so we can process the holiday. That is because the holiday booking is the basis for using your data (rather than consent). For more information, see the Legal basis of processing section.

If you are concerned about the processing of your data, please contact [email protected]. If you are unhappy with our use of your data, you also have the right to make a complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office, which supervises data protection in the UK.

At any time you have the right to ask us:

to confirm whether we hold any of your personal data
to send you a copy of any personal data that we hold about you
to correct any inaccuracies in your personal data and to add relevant details where the personal data we hold is incomplete
to delete (to the extent possible) any of your personal data, where we are required by law to do so
to stop processing your personal data, where we are required by law to do so
to let you have a portable copy of the personal data we hold about you, where we are required by law to do so
to stop processing any of your personal data that we process on the basis of our legitimate interests
to stop sending you marketing material

Please note that when these rights are exercised, we will conduct identification checks in order to ensure your privacy is safeguarded. You will need to contact us by email or post, to exercise these rights. Any request will be processed within 7 days.

We will not contact you for marketing purposes by email, phone or text message unless you have given your prior consent. We will not contact you for marketing purposes by post if you have indicated that you do not wish to be contacted.