DATA PROTECTION

Personal information is exactly what it sounds like – yours. You share your information with Sitges Hills Villas Limited (“SHV”) because you want to make a reservation for a holiday villa or apartment or order a service. But we can imagine you might want to know why we ask for your personal information and what we do with it. We are happy to inform you about it.

1. Data

SHV uses only personal information that you have provided to us directly. This may be due to you completing the booking information or you supplying additional information via e-mail or personally to us in our office. We use the following data:

– Name and address of the main booking party,

– Telephone contact number,

– E-mail address,

– Payment Information.

We also require the names, passport numbers, birth dates and a copy of the passport of you and all guests travelling with you. This is to comply with the laws of the Catalan regional government, which requires us to register each guest with the local police upon arrival and to arrange the payment of the local tourist tax on your behalf, which is payable by all guests over 16 years of age.

2. Safety

We protect all information that you provide us with the latest technology. After all, you do not want your data to be public. We do not allow anyone who has nothing to do with your data to access it. Should it be necessary for us to share the data with other companies, we require such companies that they handle the data as carefully as we do. These companies may only use the data for the purpose for which they were granted.

3. Storage period

We retain personal information only as long as necessary to administer your booking. Thereafter, the data will be deleted unless the law requires us to keep it longer. For example, the local laws require us to keep the tourist information for several years. We only retain your e-mail address, please find out below for which purpose.

4. Purposes

We use the data we receive from you for various purposes as outlined below.

Administering your booking: We use the data to process and administer your booking. When you make a reservation, you naturally want the booking to be administered to make sure the property is blocked for you, prepared for the right amount of guests and contact established with you for the check-in department to arrange your arrival etc. It is also possible that we will pass the data on to so-called ‘third parties’ to ensure that your order is properly processed. You can read more about these third parties below.

Advertising: We understand that you will be interested to know about new properties being added to our collection of properties and be made aware of special offers that we have from time to time throughout the year. We do not send more than 4 marketing emails each year. If you do not want to receive any updates or offers you can simply ask for your email address to be deleted from the mailing list by sending an e-mail to [email protected].

5. Third parties

It is possible that we may share information with companies we work with, called ‘third parties’. These companies help us to process your booking and/or provide additional services to you.

5.1 Providers of navigation / mapping software such as Google Maps can store and process (location) data. It is also possible that the data is used by Google or Apple itself. We do not have any influence and refer you to the privacy statements of these companies for more information.

5.2 If you make a booking with us or place a service order, we will pass on the relevant data (such as number of guests, villa name, main booking contact name, contact telephone number and booking dates) associated with this booking to third parties. We only do this if necessary for the execution of the agreement with us or if we are legally obliged to do so. For example, if we suspect that we have been supplied with fraudulent payment information, we may disclose personally identifiable information to the appropriate authorities.

5.3 We want to make sure that you can use our website as optimally and personally as possible. For this purpose we can use statistical services like Google Analytics. These services track how you use our website. Of course, we have made strict agreements with these companies. For example, the IP address is anonymized.

6. Cookies

We use cookies to make sure our site works well and is easy to use. We also use cookies for marketing and analytical purposes from services including, but not limited to, Google Analytics, Google Adwords and Facebook Ads.

What are cookies?

A cookie is a text-only string of information that a website transfers to the cookie file of the browser on your computer’s hard disk so that the website can remember who you are. Cookies will typically contain the name of the domain from which the cookie has come, the “lifetime” of the cookie, and a value, usually a randomly generated unique number. Two types of cookies are used on this web site – session cookies, which are temporary cookies that remain in the cookie file of your browser until you leave the site, and persistent cookies, which remain in the cookie file of your browser for much longer (though how long will depend on the lifetime of the specific cookie).

Cookies allow us to obtain information regarding users of our site which essentially helps us to provide you with a better user experience and tailor our services to your individual needs. We may collect information such as your IP address, online activity and web browser details. We will not however collect or store any of your passwords or other highly sensitive data.

Legal Update

From 26 May 2012, all websites are under an obligation to expressly obtain your consent to download cookies onto your computer for any reason other than where it is “strictly necessary” to download cookies onto your computer. It will be ‘strictly necessary’ to download a cookie on to your computer in order to complete a request made by you, e.g., to process payment of for goods/services purchased by you, to add our website to your ‘favourites’ or to enable you to subscribe to our newsletter where you have requested to do so. In order to comply with these rules, we will expressly request your consent where we need to download any cookies onto your computer for services where it is not strictly necessary to do so.

How will we ask for your consent?

When you visit our website for the first time, a pop-up will appear advising you that we use cookies on our website, and that we may download cookies on to your computer during your visit. We will provide you with a link to this privacy policy for further information on the types of cookies we use and provide you with the opportunity to ‘opt out’ of allowing us to download cookies on to your computer. The pop up will remain on your screen until you select one of the three options after which it will disappear. Should you choose not to opt out of cookies at that stage, you will be taken to have consented to our use of cookies on your computer. However, a link will remain at the bottom of our website at all times allowing you to opt out of cookies at any point should you wish to.

If you choose to opt out and prevent us from downloading cookies on to your computer this will affect your user experience of our website and we may not be able to offer you all the services on our website as a result. Therefore, in order to provide you with the best experience of our website and offer you all of our services, we would recommend not opting out of cookies.

Browser settings

Most browsers have options that allow the visitor to control whether the browser will accept cookies, reject cookies, or notify the visitor each time a cookie is sent. You may elect to reject cookies by adjusting your browser’s settings, but doing so will limit the range of features available to the visitor on our site and most other major websites that use cookies.

Further information

To find out more information about cookies, please visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie.

7. Third party websites

Our website occasionally contains links to other websites. We have no influence on these other pages. We cannot guarantee that these companies will handle the data as safely as we do. We recommend that you first read the privacy statements of these websites before using them.

8. Change of privacy policy

To inform you as much as possible about the use of data, we must occasionally amend this Privacy Policy. We therefore recommend that you read this privacy policy regularly so that you are aware of any changes that might affect you.

9. View, change, delete data or other questions?

You can send us a request to view, modify, delete the data or to make a transfer. For example, it can be checked if the data is correct. Would you like to know which data we use with your permission or do you want us to restrict or stop the data processing? You can request this. You can revoke your permission to edit at any time. If you would like to know exactly how this works or have further questions about this privacy policy, please let us know. You can contact our data protection officer (“DSB”). The DSB monitors and advises SHV on the processing of personal data. You can reach the DSB by sending an e-mail to [email protected] or sending a letter to:

Sitges Hills Villas Limited
FAO Anya Fenninger
Kinetic Business Centre
Theobald Street
Borehamwood
HERTS WD64PJ

10. Complaints?

We are happy to help you if you have any issues about our processing of personal information. You may also file a complaint with the English Personal Data Protection Authority, which oversees the processing of personal data.

This policy was last updated on 18th February 2021.