Privacy Policy

House of Paws Retreat is a small, home-based dog boarding and day care business based in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, owned and run by Rachel Martin.

We are the data controller for the personal information you provide to us through this website. This means we decide how and why your information is used, and we are responsible for looking after it in line with the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018.

We only collect the information we genuinely need to respond to your enquiries, provide our boarding and day care services, and meet our legal and licensing responsibilities. The information we may collect includes:

• From you directly — when you fill in a contact or enquiry form, register or complete your profile, add a dog profile, make a booking, upload a document, or register on the waitlist.
• From third parties — limited details shared by Google when you use Google sign-in or submit a Google Ads lead form, or by Facebook or Apple if you use those to sign in.
• Automatically — basic technical data collected by our hosting platform as described above.

We rely on the following lawful bases under UK GDPR:

We do not knowingly collect special category personal data about you (such as health or religious information). Information about your dog's health belongs to your dog rather than to you, and is held to provide their care — not as your personal data.

• To respond to your enquiry and arrange a meet & greet, booking or trial.
• To provide your dog's boarding or day care, follow their routine, and keep them safe and well during their stay.
• To contact you and your emergency or veterinary contact if something happens while your dog is with us.
• To take and process payments, deposits and balances via Stripe.
• To send you booking confirmations, updates and care communications, and to share daily updates and report cards through your customer portal.
• To meet our council home boarding licence record-keeping and our legal and tax obligations.
• To keep our website secure and working correctly.

We do not sell your personal information. We will not use your details for marketing emails unless you have asked us to or given us consent to do so.

We only share your information where it's necessary for the reasons set out above, and we keep that sharing to a minimum. We may share with:

• Our service providers (data processors) who act on our instructions:
  • Base44 — the platform that hosts our website, customer accounts and database.
  • Stripe — to process your payments securely.
  • Google — where you sign in with Google, where you reach us via a Google Ads lead form, and to sync confirmed bookings to our Google Calendar.
  • Resend — our transactional email provider, used to send you booking confirmations and updates.
• Your nominated emergency contact and veterinary practice — only where needed for your dog's welfare or in an emergency.
• Local authority / licensing officers — where our council home boarding licence requires us to keep or produce records.
• Professional advisers and authorities — such as our insurer or accountant, or where we're legally required to share information (for example by a court order or regulator).

All of our providers are bound to keep your information confidential and secure. Where a provider is based outside the UK, we rely on appropriate safeguards as set out below.

Some of our service providers (such as Stripe, Google and Resend) may process information outside the United Kingdom. Where that happens, we only do so with appropriate safeguards in place under UK GDPR — for example, by using providers that are certified under frameworks recognised by the UK government, or by putting a suitable data transfer agreement (such as the UK Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses) in place. You can ask us for more information about the safeguards relied on by contacting us using the details above.

We take the security of your personal information seriously. Your account and booking data is held within our website platform's secure database, access is restricted to authorised people on a need-to-know basis, and passwords are stored in hashed form rather than plain text. Payment card details are never held by us — they are handled solely by Stripe.

We keep our council home boarding licence, DBS check, pet first aid qualification and insurance current, and we have measures in place to protect against unauthorised access, loss or misuse. In the unlikely event of a data breach affecting your personal information, we will take prompt steps to contain it and, where required by law, notify you and the Information Commissioner's Office.

We keep your information only for as long as we need it for the purposes set out in this policy, and to meet our legal, licensing and tax obligations. As a guide:

• Booking & care records, dog profiles and documents — kept while your account is active and for a reasonable period afterwards (we currently retain these for up to 6 years after your last stay) to meet our council licence and insurance needs.
• Enquiry and contact form messages — kept only for as long as needed to resolve your enquiry, then deleted.
• Google Ads and waitlist leads — kept while we work through your enquiry and for a short period afterwards; deleted if you ask us to, or once the enquiry is clearly closed.
• Payment records — kept for the period required for tax and accounting purposes (currently up to 6 years).

If you close your account or ask us to delete your information, we will remove or anonymise it where we are not legally required to keep it.

Our website uses only the essential, functional cookies needed to keep your logged-in session working and the site secure — for example, to remember that you're signed in to your account.

With your consent, we also use analytics and marketing cookies. This includes the Meta Pixel — a tracking technology provided by Meta Platforms Inc. — which we use for advertising measurement, conversion tracking and, where you allow it, to show our advertising to people who may be interested after visiting our website. The Meta Pixel is only activated once you have given your consent to marketing cookies, and we only send Meta the standard measurement information needed for advertising (such as the page viewed, the service type and the transaction value) — never your name, your dog's name, your enquiry message, your address or any payment or card details.

Your cookie choice is stored so you aren't asked on every page, and you can change or withdraw your consent at any time using the "Cookie Preferences" link in our website footer or through your browser settings. Full details are in our Cookie Policy.

If you arrive at our site through a Google advert, Google may set its own cookies on its own platforms to measure ad performance; those are governed by Google's own privacy policy. We don't control those cookies. You can also manage or block cookies in your browser settings at any time.

Under UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, you have the following rights over your personal information:

• The right to be informed — about how we use your information (this policy).
• The right of access — to ask what personal information we hold about you and to receive a copy.
• The right to rectification — to have inaccurate information corrected.
• The right to erasure — to ask us to delete your personal information where we're not legally required to keep it.
• The right to restrict processing — to ask us to limit how we use your information in certain circumstances.
• The right to data portability — to receive certain information you provided to us in a structured, machine-readable format, and to reuse it.
• The right to object — to how we use your information, including for direct marketing.
• Rights relating to automated decision-making — we do not use automated decision-making or profiling that has a legal or similarly significant effect on you.

You also have the right to withdraw consent at any time where we're relying on consent — for example, to photo use. Withdrawing consent won't affect any processing we've already done.

It's straightforward to ask us about your information. To make a request for access, correction, deletion, or anything else in this policy — or simply to ask a privacy question — contact us using the details below and tell us what you'd like to do. We'll respond without undue delay and within one month, as required by UK GDPR.

If you're making a request, we may need to verify your identity to protect your information from unauthorised access. We'll never ask for more than we need to confirm you are who you say you are.

Our services are aimed at dog owners who are adults. Our website is not intended for children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18. If you believe a child has provided us with personal information, please contact us and we'll delete it.

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time to keep it accurate, for example if we add a new feature or way to book. The "last updated" date at the top of this page will always show when we last reviewed it. If we make significant changes to how we use your information, we'll make that clear on the site.

We hope to resolve any privacy concern you raise directly with us. However, you also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), the UK's independent authority for data protection, if you're concerned about how we've handled your personal information.