Privacy Policy
Who we are
This privacy policy explains how Cozy Holiday Cottages uses and protects any information provided through www.cozyholidaycottages.co.uk (hereinafter also referred to as the “website”).
Cozy Holiday Cottages is serious about protecting the privacy of our users. Should Cozy Holiday Cottages ask you (the user) to provide certain information by which you can be identified when using this website, be assured that it will only be used in accordance with this privacy statement.
You can contact us by emailing us on: info@cozyholidaycottages.co.uk
Please, read the following carefully to understand our views and practices regarding personal data and how we process it.
Who is our data protection officer?
Our data protection officer is Jonathan Spivey. He can be contacted by email on: info@cozyholidaycottages.co.uk
What does this privacy policy apply to?
This policy applies to any personal information you provide to us to:-
receive our newsletters;
receive customer and follow-up support;
receive marketing information or;
enter any competition or giveaway we may run.
In this Privacy Policy, we will refer to the ‘UK GDPR’. This is the General Data Protection Regulation tailored by the Data Protection Act 2018.
Our collection and use of your personal information (purpose of processing):
We collect personal information about you when you access our website, register with us, request our email newsletter, contact us, send us feedback, complete customer surveys or participate in competitions via our website or Facebook page.
We collect this personal information from you either directly, such as when you contact us or indirectly, such as your browsing activity while on our website to view our cottages.
We collect this information for:
Our newsletter: Our newsletter provides useful updates, current availability and offers. When you register to receive our newsletter, you provide us with your name and email address. Our purpose in using this information is to send you our newsletter and to personalise it to you. Our lawful basis for using your personal information in this way is legitimate interests. Our legitimate interests are meeting your expectation in providing you with a newsletter that you have requested. Although our newsletter does not contain any direct marketing content, you may still opt-out or reduce the frequency of our newsletter at any time.
Providing customer and follow-up support: We may ask for your name and details when you contact us regarding your stay. You provide this information when you send a support request to us or in correspondence with us. Our purpose in using this information is to provide you with effective and personalised support. Our lawful basis for using your personal information in this way is legitimate interests. Our legitimate interests are providing you with customer and follow-up support to enable your use of our service when booking a stay at our cottages.
Competition entries and free giveaways: We may collect and use the personal information of participants for any competitions or giveaways that we hold. We may ask for your name, postal address, and email address. You would provide this information when you register for the competition or giveaway. Our purpose in using this information is to enable you to take part in the competition or giveaway. Our lawful basis for using your personal information in this way is consent as you will give us permission to use your personal information in this way when you register for the giveaway or competition.
Testimonials: We may collect testimonials or feature guest stays from you to promote our services. The information collected may include, first name, month of visit, county visited from and comments. You would provide this information when you provide a comment in our guestbook. Our purpose in using this information is to promote our services and develop our business. Our lawful basis for using your personal information in this way is consent as we would also ask your permission to use a testimonial that you provide to us.
Lawful Basis
When we use your personal information we are required to have a lawful basis for doing so. There are various different lawful bases on which we may rely, depending on what personal information we process and why. These are detailed above. If you have any questions about them, please get in touch with us.
Where the lawful basis is consent, you have the right to withdraw your consent at any time. To withdraw your consent, please contact our Data Protection Officer using the details above.
Information we collect automatically:
Usage Data
Like all online services, when you visit or use our website, we will capture and process usage data.
This usage data is ultimately processed to deliver reliable, secure and accurate services to you and to consistently enhance, improve and optimise your experience of using our website.
We may use third parties to collect and capture usage data such as your IP address, type, operating system, device information and your mobile carrier. Additionally, we may receive or collect additional information such as the referring web page, referring search terms, and pages visited. We may use your IP address to determine your approximate location. We do not sell this data to any third parties but use it for security reasons. Our lawful basis for this processing is legitimate interests. Our legitimate interest is to measure the effectiveness of all our services to:
understand how they are used so we can improve them for you;
ensure they are engaging and relevant to your needs;
provide security to our systems and services; and
ensure our business continuity through retention.
Cookies and other Tracking Technologies
A cookie is a small text file that is downloaded onto a computer or smartphone when the user accesses a website, providing functionality.
At present we do not use third party partners to do this and will update this privacy notice should we do so.
Our website uses cookies and stored device data for the following purposes:
to ensure the correct technical functionality of the services we provide and optimise global performance - for example, to help you find the most relevant content and get that content to you quickly and accurately;
to maintain website security, prevent website abuse and ensure legislative/regulatory compliance - for example, to prevent cyber-attacks;
to compile, and enrich, internal business data regarding aggregate website traffic and activity - for example, to help us to understand our most popular website pages, visit sources and time-of-day traffic;
to help to improve our services to you and better meet your future needs through aggregated information - for example, to understand your needs and preferences so as to improve your website experience.
Our lawful basis for using cookies in this way is legitimate interests. Our legitimate interests are security, service improvement and marketing.
You can choose to remove or disable cookies via your browser settings. Our website or social media tool may not work properly if you disable or decline cookies.
Who do we share your personal information with?
We will share your personal information with our employees to enable them to provide our services to you.
We also share your information with third parties to help us operate, provide, improve, integrate, customise, support and market our services. We undertake appropriate measures to ensure that these third parties are compliant with data protection laws and security and always ensure that the appropriate legal documentation is in place.
We use service providers to provide website and application development and support, hosting, maintenance, back-up, storage, payment processing, analysis and other services for us, which may require them to access or use information about you.
If a service provider needs to access information about you to perform services on our behalf, they do so under instruction from us, and must abide by our policies and procedures designed to protect your information. Our current service providers are:
Name | Processing |
Quickbooks | Payment and recording |
Digital Ocean | Website Hosting |
Hubspot | Administration and customer support |
Mailchimp | Marketing emails and CRM |
Facebook Pixel | Analytics tool |
We may also share information about you with third parties when you give us your consent to do this. For example, we may share personal testimonials of our services on third party websites and on social media platforms.
In some very rare cases, we may share your information with a third party if we believe that sharing is reasonably necessary to:
comply with an applicable law, legal process or governmental request, including to meet national security requirements;
enforce our agreements, policies and terms of service;
protect the security and integrity of website;
protect us, you or the public from harm or illegal activities;
responding to an emergency which we believe in good faith requires us to disclose; information to assist in preventing the death or serious bodily injury of any person.
How long do we keep your personal information?
We will retain personal information where we have a contractual, legal or legitimate obligation to do so. We will retain such information for as long as reasonably required to meet such contractual, legal or legitimate obligations. We may have to retain your information for a number of years in order to satisfy these obligations. For example, we may need to comply with applicable UK, EU or international law with regards to tax and accounting requirements.
When we have no purpose and lawful grounds to use your information, or where you can exercise your rights under your country’s data protection law, we will take reasonable steps to delete or anonymise it.
How do we keep your personal information secure?
We have safeguards in place to protect your personal information. These measures are reviewed regularly and updated when necessary to meet our business needs and regulatory requirements.
We will take steps reasonably necessary to ensure that your personal information is protected. Although we do our best to keep your personal information safe, we cannot guarantee the security or integrity of any personal information which is transferred from you or to you via the Internet. The use of the Internet is not entirely secure and no company can ever make this guarantee to you. Any transmission is therefore, at your own risk.
How do we use social media?
We may use social media and social networking services for promoting our business and communicating with you. In order to do this, we require the use of third party service providers, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.
Our social media pages, groups, feeds and channels are administered by these third parties:
Our Facebook page is administered by Facebook, in accordance with Facebook's Data Policy available here, and is accessible by Facebook users who have already consented to Facebook's Data Policy.
Our Twitter account is administered by Twitter, in accordance with Twitter's Privacy Policy available here.
Our Instagram account is administered by Instagram in accordance with Instagram’s Privacy Policy available here.
Our YouTube channel is administered by YouTube, in accordance with their privacy policy available here.
We do not export information on our followers from these social media platforms to our own systems unless we have your explicit consent to do so or your public profile is linked to your organisation.
We may message you directly through social media when you contact us through these platforms. We aim to delete these messages as soon as we have responded to the queries.
Marketing
We would like to send you information about our products and services, competitions, events and special offers, which may be of interest to you. Where we have your consent or it is in our legitimate interests to do so, we may do this by email, text message (SMS) or via our social media pages.
We will only ask whether you would like us to send you marketing messages when you tick the relevant boxes when you contact us, complete an enquiry page or reach out to us via email.
If you have previously agreed to being contacted in this way, you can unsubscribe at any time by:
emailing us at info@cozyholidaycottages.co.uk; or
using the ‘unsubscribe’ link in emails or ‘STOP’ in texts
It may take up to 5 days for this to take place.
For more information on your rights in relation to marketing, see ‘Your rights’ below.
Your Rights
Under the UK GDPR you have a number of important rights free of charge. In summary, those include rights to:
fair processing of information and transparency over how we use your use personal information;
access to your personal information and to certain other supplementary information that this privacy policy is already designed to address;
require us to correct any mistakes in your information which we hold;
require the erasure of personal information concerning you in certain situations;
receive the personal information concerning you which you have provided to us, in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format and have the right to transmit those data to a third party in certain situations;
object at any time to processing of personal information concerning you for direct marketing;
object to decisions being taken by automated means which produce legal effects concerning you or similarly significantly affect you;
object in certain other situations to our continued processing of your personal information;
otherwise restrict our processing of your personal information in certain circumstances; and
claim compensation for damages caused by our breach of any data protection laws.
For further information on each of those rights, including the circumstances in which they apply, see the Guidance from the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) on individuals rights under the UK GDPR.
If you would like to exercise any of those rights, please:
email, call or write to our Data Protection Officer.
let us have enough information to identify you.
let us have proof of your identity and address (a copy of your driving licence or passport and a recent utility or credit card bill), and
let us know the information to which your request relates.
How to complain
We hope that we can resolve any query or concern you raise about our use of your information.
The UK GDPR gives you the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority, in particular in a European Economic Area state or in the United Kingdom if you work, normally live or if any alleged infringement of data protection laws occurred in the relevant state. The supervisory authority in the UK is the Information Commissioner who may be contacted at https://ico.org.uk/concerns/ or telephone: 0303 123 1113.
Updates to this Privacy Policy
This website privacy policy was published on 17th February 2024 and last updated on 15th July 2024 and will be reviewed on an annual basis.
We may change this website privacy policy from time to time and when we do we will inform you by updating this page
