Privacy policy

Who we are

HideOut Scotland is Jamie Alison, trading as a sole trader from 403 Gilmerton Road, Edinburgh EH17 7QR. We let three places to stay: The HideOut and No.10 Station Road in Kelty, Fife, and The HideOut Edinburgh.

We decide what happens to the information described here, which makes us the data controller for it under the UK GDPR.

Write to us at info@hideout-scotland.co.uk about anything on this page.

What we collect

Only what a booking needs. When you book a stay, the form asks for:

• your name
• your email address
• the house, the nights you want and how many people are coming
• anything you choose to write in the message box

To that we add the price of the stay, a booking reference, and the IP address of the device the booking was made from. We keep the IP address because holding nights is free and instant. It lets us cap how many nights one visitor can hold at once, so a script cannot block every night in every house.

We do not ask for your postal address, your date of birth or your card details, and there is no account to create.

Why we are allowed to hold it

Three reasons, in the language the law uses:

• To perform our contract with you: taking the booking, taking the payment, sending you the confirmation and the arrival details, and being able to reach you if something about your stay changes.
• Our legitimate interests: capping concurrent holds so the calendar stays honest, and keeping a record of what was booked in case a stay is later disputed.
• Our legal obligations: HMRC requires us to keep records of what we were paid.

Your card

Payment happens on Stripe, not here. When you press the button to pay you leave this site for a page Stripe hosts, and your card number is typed there. We never see it, and it is never sent to us or stored by us. What comes back to us is whether the payment succeeded and an identifier we can quote to Stripe if you ask for a refund.

Who else sees your booking

Four companies handle it on our behalf, each doing one job and nothing else with it:

• Stripe, for taking the payment.
• Resend, for sending the confirmation and cancellation letters.
• Netlify, which runs this website.
• Neon, which runs the database the bookings are written to.

Our own mailbox is Google Workspace, so a reply you send us sits there.

Airbnb and TravelNest are sent nothing about you. They receive a calendar feed that says which nights are taken and the words "Booked (hideout-scotland.co.uk)". No name, no email, no guest count, no amount.

We do not sell your details, and we do not send marketing.

Outside the UK

Stripe and Resend are American companies and your details reach the United States when they do their jobs. Both publish the safeguards they rely on for that transfer, and both are bound by contract to handle the details only as we instruct.

Cookies

This site sets none. There is no analytics, no advertising, no tracking pixel and no third-party script watching you read.

Stripe's payment page sets its own cookies, on its own domain. Stripe's privacy policy covers those.

How long we keep it

A booking that was paid for is kept for six years after the stay, which is how long tax records have to last.

A hold that was never paid for expires within the hour and its row is kept for one year, so that a dispute about a night that was blocked can still be answered.

What you can ask us to do

You can ask us for a copy of what we hold about you, to correct it, to delete it, to stop using it in a particular way, or to send it on to someone else. Email us and we will answer within a month. There is nothing to pay.

We cannot delete a booking while the stay is still to come, or while the tax record still has to exist. Where that is so we will tell you, rather than quietly do nothing.

If you think we have handled your details badly, tell us first. If that gets you nowhere, the Information Commissioner's Office takes complaints at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113.