Privacy Policy
We are committed to ensuring that your privacy is protected. Our privacy policy explains how we collect, use, disclose, retain and protect your personal information, as well as your rights and our procedures for letting you know what information we hold about you and deleting it if requested.
The information you need to know about us
We are Alpine Guides Limited, whose company registration number is 4901552 and registered office is at 14 Wrenbeck Close, Otley, West Yorkshire, LS21 2BU, United Kingdom.
The information we collect and how we use it
When making an enquiry or making a booking with us, you may be asked to share information about who you are, your contact information and other personal information in order for us to deal with your enquiry, or fulfil our contract of service with you. This will include your name, email and a phone number. Where billing information is required we will need an address.
When applying to join one of our trips, you will also be asked to provide information about your health, fitness and mountaineering or skiing experience levels. We need this information in order to assess your suitability for each trip, which is an essential part of our safety vetting and trip planning processes.
When making a booking with us, you will also be required to provide information about your age, medical conditions, next of kin emergency contact details and your rescue insurance details. We need this information for group and safety planning and in order to fulfil our duty of care toward you whilst you are on any of our trips.
You should understand that any information that you provide via our website, may be used by us to contact you regarding your enquiry, booking and any matter relating to Alpine Guides Ltd services, your request or use of this web site.
This site incorporates the use of Cookies. Cookies are small data text files that are sent from a server computer during a browsing session. Cookies are typically stored on your computers hard drive and are used by websites to simulate a continuous connection to that site. In order to make our site more responsive to your needs we use cookies to tailor our site to your needs, deliver a better and more personalised service and track the pages on our site that you visit. The use of cookies automatically identifies your browser to our computers whenever you interact with our site. Your browser options allow you to disable cookies. You should note that if you do disable cookies, you may not be able to access all the services on this site.
Who we share your data with
The data processors we use for our business operations, who process your data under our control include:
- Rezdy who provide our booking system
- Mailchimp for our email marketing campaigns
- Fasthosts Internet Ltd who provide our website hosting
- Google.com (gmail and business apps) who provide our office & email system hosting
- Spanning who provide our data backup service
- Google.com (analytics) who provide website tracking and statistical services
- Fluent Forms who provide our enquiries, client and guide information collection forms
- Stripe who provide our card processing service
- Transferwise who provide our bank transfer services
- Xero who provide our accounts software
- ABTOT who provide our package travel regs financial protection
In all cases, the servers where your personal data is stored and processed are located either in the EU, or where your data is transferred outside the EU for processing, our service providers are EU-US Privacy Shield certified and GDPR compliant.
If you do not wish for your information to be processed by servers outside the EU, then please contact us by telephone for queries and enquiries and download or request a paper booking form from us to make your booking.
Sharing your data with other 3rd parties
When you make a booking with us, we share information about you with our guides and suppliers (eg huts and hotels) in order for us to fulfil our contract with you. We only disclose the minimum information that is required for any given task (eg just your name, for room lists) and we do not sell or share your data with anyone else. Under special circumstances, we may also share your details (such as to emergency services) or when we believe in good faith that it is required by law.
Marketing
We would however like to use your name and email address to inform you of our future trips, special offers and similar holidays. However, we will only do this if you give us permission to do so. This information is not shared with any third parties and you can choose to unsubscribe any time by using the unsubscribe link on our marketing emails.
How do we protect your personal information
In order to keep your information safe, all our data processors adhere to industry current best practice and standards regarding encryption and data transfer and storage. We only disclose the minimum amount of personal client information to our members of staff and suppliers on a ‘need to know’ basis and only for the duration of the services being provided. Both we and our suppliers are committed to prompt reporting and resolution of any data breaches should they occur.
How long we keep your personal information
We keep your personal information in line with our data retention policy. This means that we will remove data which we have collected directly from you from our systems if we haven’t had any direct contact with you for more than 10 years (we believe this is reasonable as guides typically build up longstanding relationships with clients that can last over decades, so this period typifies the maximum length of time between trips that might occur with an established client). We retain a record of your previous trips, ascents and experience in order to help us plan appropriate and enjoyable trips for you in the future.
In certain circumstances, we have a statutory obligation to keep your personal information for a set period of time for example financial information (normally 6-7 years) for financial auditing purposes.
How to keep your personal information up-to-date
It’s important for both you and us that your personal information is correct. If you believe this not to be the case and you are registered on our bookings website then please log-in and update your details in the “my account” section. If you do not have a website account with us then please e-mail the amended details to info@alpine-guides.com and we will contact you to verify your identity.
How you can find out about the information we hold about you
You have the right to request a copy of the information that we hold about you.
If you would like a copy of some or all of your personal information, please email or write to us using the contact details in this policy.
We will get in contact to verify your identity and if we do hold information about you we will:
- give you a description of it
- tell you why we are holding it
- tell you who it could be shared with
- let you have a concise and clear copy of the information
Our legal basis for processing your personal information
Much of our processing will be under the basis of “contractual obligation” in other words we need and use your personal information for providing the services you have requested or have contracted with us.
However, when we are communicating with you regarding products and services you may be interested in receiving from us in the future, our basis for processing is our legitimate interest. Of course you will always have the opportunity to unsubscribe, as detailed in the ‘marketing’ section above.
Asking us to suppress or remove your personal information
Should you wish to not receive information from us in future then you can quickly action this by clicking the unsubscribe link you will find on our marketing e-mails or by sending your details to info@alpine-guides.com and we will quickly suppress your data.
Should you further wish for us to remove your information entirely (and assuming we have no other obligation to keep it) then please let us know and we will do this – but we would encourage you to let us use it for suppression purposes only.
What to do if you have a complaint
If you have a complaint, please contact our Data Protection Officer at info@alpine-guides.com who will deal with your request promptly.
If you are still not satisfied with the way your complaint was handled, you can refer your complaint to UK Information Commissioner’s Office. https://ico.org.uk/concerns/
Links to other websites
We link our website directly to other sites. This privacy notice does not cover the links within our site linking to other websites and organisations. We encourage you to read the privacy statements on the other websites you visit.
Sale of business
In the event that this business is sold or integrated with another business your details may be disclosed to our advisers and any prospective purchasers’ advisers and will be passed on to the new owners of the business. It is therefore intended that any consents given above or on the relevant pages will benefit any purchaser of our business.
Your use of our services
Please be sure you are aware of these policy terms while you use our site. Should our terms change these will be shown on this page, and we may place notices on other pages of the web site, so that you may be aware of the information we collect and how we use it at all times.