Your details,
and what we do with them.

Cove Bay Hotel, 15 Colsea Road, Cove Bay, Aberdeen AB12 3NA, is the data controller for the personal information collected through this website. That means we decide what is collected and why, and we are responsible for looking after it.

If you have a question about anything on this page, ring 01224 897211 or email info@covebayhotel.co.uk.

Browsing the site. You can read every page without telling us who you are. Our hosting provider keeps standard server logs (IP address, pages requested, time, browser type) for security and to keep the site running. They are not used to identify you.

Enquiries. When we add an enquiry form to this site it will ask for your name, email address, phone number and your message, and nothing else. We use those details to answer you and for nothing else. Until that form is live, you can reach us by phone or email, and an email you send us is kept in our mailbox in the ordinary way.

Room bookings. When you press Book a room you are taken to our online booking page, which is run for us by STAAH (SwiftBook). The details you enter there, including your name, contact details, dates and payment card, are collected by STAAH on its own systems under its own privacy policy, and shared with us so that we can hold your room and welcome you.

Table bookings. When you press Book a table you are taken to our table booking page, run for us by ResDiary. The name, contact details and booking details you enter there are collected by ResDiary under its own privacy policy and shared with us so that we can hold your table.

UK data protection law (the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018) says we need a reason to use your information. Ours are these.

Contract: to take your booking, hold your room or table, and look after you while you are here.

Legitimate interests: to answer an enquiry you have sent us, to keep the website secure, and to keep the accounting records a business has to keep. We only rely on this where it does not override your own rights and interests.

Legal obligation: where the law requires us to keep a record, for example for tax.

Consent: for anything optional, such as analytics cookies. You can withdraw consent at any time and it will not affect your booking.

Enquiries: for as long as it takes to deal with them, and then no longer than twelve months, unless the enquiry turns into a booking.

Bookings: for the period the law requires us to keep business and accounting records, which is normally six years after the end of the financial year the booking falls in.

Server logs: kept by our hosting provider for a short rolling period for security purposes only.

We do not sell your information and we do not pass it to anyone for marketing.

We share it only with the companies that help us run the hotel and the website: STAAH for room bookings, ResDiary for table bookings, our website hosting provider, the provider that delivers enquiry form messages once the form is live, and our accountants where the law requires it. Each of them may use your information only to do that job for us, and where one of them stores it outside the United Kingdom it must protect it to the standard UK law expects.

We will also share information if the law requires us to, for example with the police or a court.

This website uses Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics to understand how it is used: which pages are read, how visitors find us, and which buttons they use, such as booking a room or calling us. Google provides this service to us.

Analytics cookies, and advertising cookies if we use them in future, are set only if you accept them in the cookie banner. If you decline, none are set and the site works just the same. Google still receives a basic signal that a page was viewed, without cookies, which lets us count visits in total but does not identify you.

You can change your choice at any time with the Cookie settings link at the bottom of every page. Apart from that, the site uses only what it needs to work, such as remembering your cookie choice in your browser.

The booking pages run by STAAH and ResDiary set their own cookies, which are covered by their own policies linked above.

Under the UK GDPR you can ask us for a copy of the information we hold about you, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, ask us to stop or limit how we use it, and object to us using it. Where we rely on your consent, you can withdraw it at any time.

To use any of these rights, ring 01224 897211 or email info@covebayhotel.co.uk. We will reply within one month. We may ask you to confirm who you are first, so that we do not hand your information to someone else.

If you are not happy with how we have handled your information, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office, the UK regulator. We would rather you told us first so that we can put it right.

If the way we handle your information changes, for example when the enquiry form or analytics go live, we will update this page and change the date at the top. We do not send notices about it, so please check back if it matters to you.