Villa Rosa - Privacy Policy and Cookie Information
Villa Rosa is a privately owned house in Lanzarote that we make available for holiday rental. This website is operated by a UK based family for the purpose of promoting holiday rental of the villa.
Your Privacy
If you wish to make an enquiry about renting the villa, we ask you to email or complete an online form. We collect your name, email address and perhaps telephone number or other contact details so we can provide you with the information you request. You supply similar information if you contact us via a third party website. If you subsequently decide to rent Villa Rosa, we may ask for further contact details.
If you make an Provisional Booking Request or an Immediate online Booking we ask you for further details including your address. In the case of an Immediate Booking we use the services of PayPal (Europe) S.à r.l. & Cie, S.C.A. to enable you to pay for your booking. PayPal will collect enough information from you to enable you to pay. PayPal will confirm your name to us but never passes on your credit or debit card information if you pay by such means.
We may use your information in the future, in a limited way, to inform you about the villa. We will stop if you ask us to. We may keep your information for a reasonable amount of time unless you don't want that to happen. We will not pass your contact information to any other party without your explicit permission unless you rent Villa Rosa.
If you book Villa Rosa we will pass your name to our property management agents in Lanzarote to enable them to do their job. We will not give your details to any other party.
Cookies
If your browser settings allow it, this website uses cookies. These are explained below. You should note that if you set your browser to disallow first party cookies then certain functions, including the booking process, will not work. The information stored in cookies does not identify you personally.
Session Cookie
This website places a "session" cookie on your computer or whatever device you are using to view the site. This cookie holds a session identifier, a string of letters and numbers, that is used by our website to maintain continuity as you browse between the different pages. Session cookies are destroyed when you close your browser. This session identifier is used to "maintain state" across the website for a number of purposes:
- If you select a month, arrival or departure date on the availability calendar on any page, or the make up of your party on the booking page, that information is "remembered" as you move pages. Importantly, this information is transferred to, or retained by, the booking page which enables you to check availability and make a booking.
- If you use the "check availability" button or partially complete the booking form or the enquiry form and then move to another page, the information or partial information is remembered. This allows you to return to the form without having to start again after, for example, checking other pages on the website. Similarly if you proceed with the booking and visit the PayPal payment page but return without paying, the booking information on your booking form is retained.
- If you proceed with the booking, make a payment using the PayPal payment page, and naturally return to this website, the session identifier ensures that your booking dates are marked as "booked" and you receive the appropriate automatic email from us.
- Our Reviews and Comments page uses the session identifer to manage the process when a user posts a comment or review.
- Mobile device users are automatically diverted to a mobile version of the website which is formatted to suit such devices. However, the user can choose to visit the main site and the session identifier is used to keep the user on the main site, if required.
- If you use the "A" links near the top right of the page to change the size of the main body text, this information is remembered between pages so you don't have to change the text size on every page.
- This website uses a "fluid" page layout and adjusts the page layout to suit your browser width setting. Once done, this information is remembered between pages which reduces the time taken to reformat subsequent pages and reduces the visual disturbances between pages.
- The session identifier is also used for an experimental first party website statistics gathering tool outlined below.
We consider that purposes 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 outlined above, are "strictly necessary", under the meaning of the UK Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003, as amended 2011, because without the cookie you would not be able to effectively check the availability of Villa Rosa, make a booking or post a comment, which are primary purposes of this website, and mobile users could constantly be redirected to where they didn't want to go. We therefore believe that consent is not required to use this session cookie.
Although not "strictly necessary", purposes 6 and 7 are intended to make your visit a better experience and since no extra cookie is used and there are no privacy implications, we consider that we do not need to take any particular action for these purposes. Purpose 8 is debatable but we believe that, since the cookie is already there, no other cookies are used for this purpose, no personal information is gathered and no site-to-site tracking is possible and considering Version 2 (13th December 2011) of the guidelines from the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), further action is not required.
Just to reiterate, the session cookie is destroyed when you close your browser so the processes outlined above have to start again if you visit our website at a later time.
Third Party Website Statistics and Analytics Tools
Our pages on this website currently use two third party agents, Google Analytics and StatCounter, to collect basic information about your Internet browser, and to recognise and count visitors as they browse the site. This helps us form and improve the way our website works to suit our regular visitors. Included in this information is the IP address of your Internet connection and this might be used to identify your country and other location details. This location information, although not always accurate, helps us to further understand the needs of our website visitors.
Google Analytics uses four "first party" cookies - one session cookie and three "persistent" cookies - to carry out this task. Unlike the session cookie, which is destroyed when you close your browser, the "persistent" cookie is stored on your hard drive, or in some other nonvolatile memory, and remains there for a period of time unless you delete it. Persistent cookies are used to record multiple visits. First party cookies can only be retrieved when you visit our website and not any other website. We don't see the IP address that Google Analytics collects, just the associated location information. Our Google Analytics account has data sharing settings that don't allow Google to share the data with anyone else. You can read more about Google Analytics, including how to opt out of all Google Analytics data collection, on their Google Analytics Privacy Overview
web page.
Guidelines from the UK ICO state that the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003, as amended 2011, requires user consent to use cookies for website analytical purposes. However, the guidance also indicates that first party analytical cookies are highly unlikely to receive regulatory attention provided the use of such cookies is made clear to the user. This guidance is, let's say, confusing and we'd welcome opinion or feedback on the matter from general visitors. For reasons explained, analytics tools are very useful but we might consider removing this one if we think consent really is necessary. That's because we believe most people do not understand cookies and therefore consent will not be given and in many ways partial analytical data is of less use than no analytical data.
StatCounter uses a third party "persistent" cookie to gather similar information to Google Analytics. This cookie can be recovered by any website that also uses StatCounter. The visitor information collected by StatCounter, including the IP address, is available to us and we find it very useful but, because the cookie is third party and could possibly be used for site-to-site tracking, we are considering removing the tool from our website.
First Party Website Statistics and Analytics Tool
As a result of the 2011 amendment to the UK Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations this website is experimenting with the use of a method of collecting and analysing website visitor statistics that just uses the existing session cookie that holds the session identifier. The resulting data, which contains no personal information, is stored on this website's server and not third party servers such as Google Analytics or StatCounter. These statistics include visitor IP address and basic browser information such as screen size and browser type, along with a record of the pages visited on the site and the paths taken. It helps us form the pages and content to suit regular visitors, deliver the content that the user is looking for and generally analyse how the website is used and how it performs. The data obtained is similar to the that obtained using the third party agents but does not include any return visitor information. We have no interest in site-to-site visitor tracking and the data is most definitely not shared with any other website or party. The technique currently uses the session identifier stored in the session cookie outlined above but persistent cookies are not used.
No other cookies are used on this website.
For a comprehensive guide about cookies, including how to control and delete them, see aboutcookies.org.
