Personal data you give to us.

Africa Luxury Escapes collects and uses the information you provide to us. When you make a Trip Reservation, you are (at a minimum) asked for your name and email address.

Depending on the Trip Reservation, we may also ask for your home address, telephone number, payment information, date of birth, the names of the people travelling with you and any preferences you might have for your Trip (such as dietary or accessibility requirements).

If you need to get in touch with our customer service team, contact your Trip Provider through us, or reach out to us in a different way (such as social media) we’ll collect information from you there, too. This applies whether you are contacting us with feedback or asking for help using our services.

You might also be invited to write reviews to help inform others about the experiences you had on your Trip. When you write a review on the Trustpilot platform, we’ll collect any information you’ve included, along with your display name and avatar (if you choose one).

Personal data you give us about others.

Of course, you might not simply be making a Trip Reservation for yourself. You might be taking a Trip with other people or making a reservation on someone else’s behalf. In both those scenarios, you will provide their details as part of the Trip Reservation. It’s your responsibility to ensure that the person or people you have provided personal data about are aware that you’ve done so, and that they have understood and accepted how Africa Luxury Escapes uses their information (as described in this Privacy Policy).

Personal data we collect automatically.

Whether or not you end up making a Trip Reservation, when you visit our websites or apps we automatically collect certain information. This includes your IP address, the date and time you accessed our services, and information about your computer’s hardware and software (such as the operating system, the internet browser used, software/application version data and your language settings). We also collect information about clicks and which pages have been shown to you.

Personal data we receive from other sources.

We also integrate with third party service providers to facilitate payments between you and Trip Providers. These service providers share payment information so we can administer and handle your Trip Reservation, making sure everything goes as smoothly as possible for you.

Additionally, we collect information in the regrettable case that we receive a complaint about you from a Trip Provider, for example in the case of misconduct.

Another way we might receive data about you, is through the communication services integrated into our platforms. These communication services offer you a way to contact the Trip Provider you’ve booked with to discuss your stay. In some cases, we receive metadata about these communication activities (such as who you are, where you called from, and the date and length of the call).

We may also receive information about you in order to show you more relevant ads, such as the additional cookie data Africa Luxury Escapes social media partners make available to us. Please read the section Why does Africa Luxury Escapes collect and use your personal data? for more information.

Trip Providers may share information about you with Africa Luxury Escapes, too. This could happen if you have support questions about a pending Trip Reservation, or if disputes or other issues arise about a Trip Reservation.

Your personal data may be used in the following ways:

1. Trip Reservations: First and foremost, we use your personal data to complete and administer your online Trip Reservation – which is essential for what we do. This includes sending you communications that relate to your Trip Reservation, such as confirmations, modifications and reminders.
2. Customer service: We provide international customer service from our local offices. Sharing relevant details, such as reservation information or information about your user account with our global customer service staff allows us to respond when you need us. This includes helping you to contact the right Trip Provider and responding to any questions you might have about your Trip Reservation (or any other queries, for that matter).
3. Marketing activities: We use your information for marketing activities. These activities include:
   • Using your contact information to send you regular news about travel-related products and services. You can unsubscribe from email marketing communications quickly, easily and at any time. All you need to do is click on the ‘Unsubscribe’ link included in each newsletter or other communication.
   • Based on your information, individualised offers might be shown to you on the Africa Luxury Escapes website, in mobile apps or on third-party websites/apps (including social media sites) and the content of the site displayed to you might be personalised. These could be offers that you can book directly on the Africa Luxury Escapes website, on co-branded sites, or other third-party offers or products we think you might find interesting.
4. Communicating with you: There might be other times when we get in touch, including by email, by post, by phone or by texting you. Which method we choose depends on the contact information you’ve previously shared.We process the communications you send to us. There could be a number of reasons for this, including:
   • Responding to and handling any requests you or your booked Trip Provider have made. Africa Luxury Escapes also offers customers and Trip Providers various ways to exchange information, requests and comments about Trip Providers and existing Trip Reservations via Africa Luxury Escapes. For more information, read the section titled ‘How does Africa Luxury Escapes process communications that you and your booked Trip Provider may send through Africa Luxury Escapes?’.
   • If you have started but not finished a Trip Reservation online, we might contact you to invite you to continue with your reservation. We believe that this additional service benefits you as it allows you to pick up the process where you left off without having to search for a Trip Provider or fill in your reservation details again.
   • When you use our services, we might send you a questionnaire or invite you to provide a review about your experience with Africa Luxury Escapes or the Trip Provider.
   • We also send you other material related to your Trip Reservations, such as how to contact Africa Luxury Escapes if you need assistance while you’re away, and information that we feel might be useful to you in planning or getting the best out of your Trip. We might also send you material related to upcoming Trip Reservations or a summary of previous Trip Reservations you made through Africa Luxury Escapes.
   • Even if you don’t have an upcoming Trip Reservation, we may still need to send you other administrative messages, which could include security alerts.
5. Market research: We sometimes invite our customers to take part in market research. Please see the information that accompanies this kind of invitation to understand what personal data will be collected and how that data is used.
6. Improving our services: We also use personal data for analytical purposes and product improvement. This is part of our commitment to making our services better and enhancing the user experience.In this case, we use data for testing and troubleshooting purposes, as well as to generate statistics about our business. The main goal here is to get insights into how our services perform, how they are used, and ultimately to optimise and customise our website and apps, making them easier and more meaningful to use. As much as possible, we strive to use pseudonyms for this analytical work.
7. Providing the best price applicable to you, depending on where you are based: When you search our apps or website, for example to find an accommodation, a rental car or a flight, we process your IP address to confirm whether you are in the European Economic Area (EEA) or in another country. We do this to offer you the best price for the region (EEA) or country (non-EEA) where you are based.
8. Customer reviews and other destination-related information: During and after your Trip, we might invite you to submit a review. We can also make it possible for the people you’re travelling with or whom you’ve booked a reservation for to do this instead. This invite asks for information about the Trip Provider or the destination. By completing a review, you’re agreeing that it can be displayed (as described in detail in our Terms and Conditions) on, for example, the relevant Trip Provider information page on our websites, on our social media accounts and social media apps, or on the online platform of the relevant Trip Provider or business partner’s website. This is to inform other travellers about the quality of the Trip Service you used, the destination you have chosen or any other experiences you choose to share.
9. Call monitoring: When you make calls to our customer service team, Africa Luxury Escapes uses an automated telephone number detection system to match your telephone number to your existing reservations. This can help save time for both you and our customer service staff. However, our customer service staff may still ask for authentication, which helps to keep your reservation details confidential. During calls with our customer service team, live listening might be carried out or calls might be recorded for quality control and training purposes. This includes the usage of the recordings for the handling of complaints, legal claims and for fraud detection.Not all calls are recorded and recordings are kept for a limited amount of time before being automatically deleted. An exception to this rule would be if Africa Luxury Escapes has a legitimate need to keep the recordings longer for fraud investigation or legal purposes.
10. Promotion of a safe and trustworthy service: To create a trustworthy environment for you, the people you bring with you on your Trip, Africa Luxury Escapes’s business partners and our Trip Providers, we might use personal data to detect and prevent fraud and other illegal or unwanted activities.Similarly, we might use personal data for risk assessment and security purposes, including the authentication of users and reservations. When we do this we may have to stop or put certain Trip Reservations on hold until we’ve finished our assessment.
11. Legal purposes: Finally, in certain cases, we may need to use your information to handle and resolve legal disputes, for regulatory investigations and compliance, to enforce the Africa Luxury Escapes online reservation service terms of use or to comply with lawful requests from law enforcement. Providing your personal data to Africa Luxury Escapes is voluntary. However, we may only be able to provide you with certain services if we can collect some personal data. For instance, we can’t process your Trip Reservation if we don’t collect your name and contact details.If we use automation to process personal data which produces legal effects or significantly affects you, we will always implement the measures required to safeguard your rights and freedoms. This includes the right to obtain human intervention.

To process your personal data as described above, we rely on the following legal bases:

As applicable, for purpose (1) and (2) above, Africa Luxury Escapes relies on the legal basis that the processing of personal data is necessary for the performance of a contract, specifically to finalise and administer your Trip Reservation.

If the required personal data is not provided, Africa Luxury Escapes cannot finalise the Trip Reservation, nor can we provide customer service. In view of purposes (3) to (10), Africa Luxury Escapes relies on its legitimate commercial business interest to provide its services, to prevent fraud and to improve its services (as set out more specifically under (3) to (10)).

When using personal data to serve Africa Luxury Escapes’s or a third party’s legitimate interest, Africa Luxury Escapes will always balance your rights and interests in the protection of your personal data against Africa Luxury Escapes’s rights and interests or those of the third party. For purposes (11), Africa Luxury Escapes also relies, where applicable, on compliance with legal obligations (such as lawful law enforcement requests).

Finally, where needed under applicable law, Africa Luxury Escapes will obtain your consent prior to processing your personal data, including for email marketing purposes or as otherwise required by law.

If you wish to object to the processing set out under (3) to (10) and no opt-out mechanism is available to you directly, please contact us at [email protected]

In certain circumstances, we’ll share your personal data with third parties. These third parties include:

1. The Trip Provider you booked: In order to complete your Trip Reservation, we transfer relevant reservation details to the Trip Provider you have booked. This is one of the most essential things we do for you. Depending on the Trip Reservation and the Trip Provider, the details we share can include your name, contact and payment details, the names of the people accompanying you and any other information or preferences you specified when you made your Trip Reservation.In certain cases, we also provide some additional historical information about you to the Trip Provider. This includes whether you’ve already booked with them in the past, the number of completed bookings you’ve made with Africa Luxury Escapes, a confirmation that no misconduct has been reported about you, the percentage of bookings you’ve cancelled in the past or whether you’ve given reviews about past bookings.If you have a query about your Trip, we may contact the Trip Provider to handle your request. Unless payment is made during the booking process, via the Africa Luxury Escapes website, we will forward your credit card details to the booked Trip Provider for further handling (assuming you’ve provided us with those details).In cases of Trip Reservation-related disputes, we may provide the Trip Provider with your contact details, including your email address and information about the Trip Reservation process needed to handle the dispute. This can include a copy of your reservation confirmation as proof that a Trip Reservation was actually made.

   Please note that, sometimes, at the direction of the Trip Provider, we will need to share your personal data with parties related to the Trip Provider in order to finalise and administer your reservation. These parties might include other entities of a hotel group or service providers who are handling the data on the Trip Provider’s behalf.

2. Third-party service providers: We use service providers from outside of the Africa Luxury Escapes corporate group to support us in providing our services. These include:
   • Customer support
   • Market research
   • Fraud detection and prevention (including anti-fraud screening)
   • Payment
     We use third parties to process payments, handle chargebacks or provide billing collection services. When a chargeback is requested for your Trip Reservation, either by you or by the holder of the credit card used to make your reservation, we need to share certain reservation details with the payment service provider and the relevant financial institution so they can handle the chargeback. This may also include a copy of your reservation confirmation or the IP address used to make your reservation. We may share information with relevant financial institutions, if we consider it strictly necessary for fraud detection and prevention purposes.
   • Marketing services
     We share personal data with advertising partners, including your email address, as part of marketing Africa Luxury Escapes services via third parties (to ensure that relevant advertisements are shown to the right audience). We use techniques such as hashing to enable the matching of your email address with an existing customer database, so that your email address cannot be used for other purposes. For information on other personalised advertisements and your choices, please read our Cookie Statement
   • Advertising partners
     We use advertising partners, such as metasearch providers, to allow you to compare our offers with the offers of other Online Travel Agencies (OTA’s). When you make a reservation on Africa Luxury Escapes after using an advertising partner, we will send the details of the reservation that you made on Africa Luxury Escapes to that partner.

   All service providers are required to continue to adequately safeguard your personal data.

3. Competent authorities: We disclose personal data to law enforcement to the extent that it is required by law or is strictly necessary for the prevention, detection or prosecution of criminal acts and fraud, or if we are otherwise legally obliged to do so. We may need to further disclose personal data to competent authorities to protect and defend our rights or properties, or the rights and properties of our business partners.
4. Business partners: We work with many business partners around the world. These business partners distribute or advertise the Africa Luxury Escapes services, including the services and products of our Trip Providers.When you make a reservation on one of our business partners’ websites or apps, certain personal data that you give them, such as your name and email address, your address, payment details and other relevant information, will be forwarded to us to finalise and manage your Trip Reservation.If customer service is provided by the business partner, Africa Luxury Escapes will share relevant reservation details with them (as and when needed) in order to provide you with appropriate and efficient support.When you make a reservation through one of our business partners’ websites, the business partners can receive certain parts of your personal data related to the specific reservation and your interactions on these partner websites. This is for their commercial purposes.

   When you make a reservation on a business partners’ website, please also take the time to read their privacy policy if you’d like to understand how they process your personal data.

   For fraud detection and prevention purposes, we may also exchange information about our users with business partners – but only when strictly necessary

   • Partner Offer: We may enable you to book using Partner Offer. Partner Offer means that your reservation is facilitated by a Trip Provider separate from the booked accommodation. As part of the reservation process, we’ll need to share some relevant personal data with this Trip Provider.If Partner Offer is used, please review the information provided in the booking process or check your reservation confirmation for more information about the Trip Provider and how your personal data is further processed by them.

The transmission of personal data, as described in this Privacy Policy, may include overseas transfers of personal data to countries whose data protection laws are not as comprehensive as those of countries within the European Union.

Where required by European law, we will only transfer personal data to recipients that offer an adequate level of data protection. In these situations, as may be required, we make contractual arrangements to ensure that your personal data is still protected in line with European standards. You can ask us to see a copy of these contractual agreements by contacting us at [email protected].

Africa Luxury Escapes is assosiated with Cape Town Luxury Escapes (Pty) Ltd. More information is available at luxuryescapes.capetown.

We may receive personal data about you from other companies in the association  group, or share your personal data with them, for the following purposes:

1. To provide services (including to make, administer and manage reservations or handle payments)
2. To provide customer service
3. To detect, prevent and investigate fraudulent, other illegal activities and data breaches
4. For analytical and product improvement purposes
5. To provide personalised offers or send you marketing with your consent or as otherwise permitted by applicable law
6. For hosting, technical support, overall maintenance and maintaining security of such shared data
7. To ensure compliance with applicable laws

As applicable and unless indicated otherwise, for purposes (1) to (6), Africa Luxury Escapes relies on its legitimate interest to share and receive personal data. For purpose G, Africa Luxury Escapes relies, where applicable, on compliance with legal obligations (such as lawful law enforcement requests).

For example, Africa Luxury Escapes works closely with Rentalcars.com to offer ground transport services to customers. Please read How is your personal data shared and further processed for ground transport services? for more information.

All companies within the Booking Holdings Inc. group of companies may need to exchange personal customer data to ensure all users are protected from fraudulent activities on its online platforms.

Africa Luxury Escapes can offer you and Trip Providers various ways to communicate about the Trip Services and existing Trip Reservations, directing the communications via Africa Luxury Escapes. This also allows you and your Trip Provider to contact Africa Luxury Escapes with questions about your Trip Reservation through the website, our apps and the other channels that we make available.

Africa Luxury Escapes accesses communications and may use automated systems to review, scan, and analyse communications for the following reasons:

• Security purposes
• Fraud prevention
• Compliance with legal and regulatory requirements
• Investigations of potential misconduct
• Product development and improvement
• Research
• Customer engagement (including to provide you with information and offers that we believe may be of interest to you)
• Customer or technical support

We reserve the right to review or block the delivery of communications that we, in our sole discretion, believe might contain malicious content or spam, or pose a risk to you, Trip Providers, Africa Luxury Escapes or others.

All communications sent or received using Africa Luxury Escapes communication tools will be received and stored by Africa Luxury Escapes. Business partners (through whose platform you’ve made a reservation) and Trip Providers might also choose to communicate with you directly, by email or other channels that Africa Luxury Escapes does not control.

We offer versions of our regular website that have been optimised for browsing on a mobile and tablet.

These apps and mobile websites process the personal details you give us in much the same way as our website does. They also allow you to use location services to find Trip Services nearby, if you want to.

With your consent, we may send you push notifications with information about your Trip Reservation. You can also choose to grant us access to your location data or contact details in order to provide services you’ve requested. If you upload pictures to our platform, these pictures may include location information (known as metadata) as well. Please read your mobile device’s instructions to understand how to change your settings and control the sharing of this kind of data.

In order to optimise our services and marketing activities, and to make sure we give you a consistent user experience, we use something known as ‘cross-device tracking’. This can be done with or without the use of cookies. For more general information about cookies and other similar technologies, please see our Cookie policy.

With cross-device tracking, Africa Luxury Escapes is able to track user behaviour across multiple devices. As part of cross-device tracking, we may combine data collected from a particular browser or mobile device with data from another computer or device that is linked to it.

In order to optimise the content of the Africa Luxury Escapes newsletter, we combine searches and reservations made from different computers and devices. You can unsubscribe from the Africa Luxury Escapes newsletter at any time.

Personalised ads shown to you on other websites or in apps, can be offered based on your activities on linked computers and devices. By changing the cookie settings on your device (see our Cookie policy under ‘What are your choices?’), you can change your cross-device tracking settings for advertisement purposes.

We use it to facilitate the use of online reservation services, but also to promote our Trip Providers’ travel-related products and services and to advertise, improve and facilitate our own services.

Note that the use of social media features can result in the exchange of personal data between Africa Luxury Escapes and the social media service provider, as we describe below. You are free not to use any of the social media features available to you.

1. Integration of social media plugins. We have also integrated social media plugins into the Africa Luxury Escapes website and apps. This means that when you click on one of the buttons (such as Facebook’s ‘Like’ button), certain information is shared with these social media providers.If you’re logged into your social media account at the same time, your social media provider may relate this information to your social media account. Depending on your settings, they might also display these actions on your social media profile, to be seen by others in your network.
2. Other social media services and features. We may integrate other social media services (like social media messaging) for you to interact with Africa Luxury Escapes or with your contacts about our services.We may maintain social media accounts and offer apps on several social media sites. Whenever you connect with Africa Luxury Escapes through social media, your social media service provider may allow you to share information with us.If you choose to share, you will generally be told by your social media provider which information will be shared. For example, when you sign into an Africa Luxury Escapes user account using your social media account, certain information may be shared with Africa Luxury Escapes, including your email address, age or profile pictures saved to your social media account depending on what you authorize.

Your social media provider will be able to tell you more about how they use and process your data when you connect to Africa Luxury Escapes through them. This can include combining the personal data they collect when you use Africa Luxury Escapes through them with information they collect when you use other online platforms you have also linked to your social media account.

We have procedures in place to prevent unauthorised access to, and the misuse of, personal data.

We use appropriate business systems and procedures to protect and safeguard the personal data you give us. We also use security procedures and technical and physical restrictions for accessing and using the personal data on our servers. Only authorised personnel are permitted to access personal data in the course of their work.

We’ll keep your personal data for as long as we think it’s necessary to enable you to use our services or to provide our services to you, to comply with applicable laws, resolve any disputes and otherwise to allow us to conduct our business, including to detect and prevent fraud or other illegal activities. All personal data we keep about you is covered by this Privacy Policy.

Our services aren’t intended for children under 18 years old, and we’ll never collect their data unless it’s provided by (and with the consent of) a parent or guardian. The limited cases we might need to collect data include as part of a reservation, the purchase of other travel-related services, or in other exceptional circumstances (such as features addressed to families). Again, this will only be used and collected as provided by a parent or guardian and with their consent.

If we become aware that we’ve processed the information of a child under 18 years old without the valid consent of a parent or guardian, we will delete it.

We want you to be in control of how your personal data is used by us. You can do this in the following ways:

1. You can ask us for a copy of the personal data we hold about you,
2. You can inform us of any changes to your personal data, or you can ask us to correct any of the personal data we hold about you. As explained below, you can make some of these changes yourself when you have a user account,
3. In certain situations, you can ask us to erase, block, or restrict the processing of the personal data we hold about you, or object to particular ways in which we are using your personal data,
4. In certain situations, you can also ask us to send the personal data you have given us to a third party,
5. Where we are using your personal data on the basis of your consent, you are entitled to withdraw that consent at any time subject to applicable law, and
6. Where we process your personal data based on legitimate interest or the public interest, you have the right to object to that use of your personal data at any time, subject to applicable law.

We rely on you to make sure that your personal information is complete, accurate and current. Please do let us know about any changes to, or inaccuracies in, your personal information as soon as possible.

If any of the personal data we have about you isn’t accessible through our website or apps, you can send us a request (which won’t cost you anything).

If you want to exercise your right of access or erasure, all you need to do is contact us. For any requests relating to this Privacy Policy, to exercise any of your other rights, or if you have a complaint, please contact [email protected]. You can also contact your local data protection authority.

If you’d like to object to your personal data being processed on the basis of legitimate interest and there’s no way to opt out directly, please contact us at [email protected].

Africa Luxury Escapes controls the processing of personal data, as described in this Privacy Policy, except where explicitly stated otherwise. Africa Luxury Escapes is a private limited liability company, incorporated under the laws of South Africa and has its offices at 17 Manchester Street, Hout Bay, Cape Town. 7806, South Africa.

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, or about our processing of your personal data, please contact [email protected] and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

For questions about a reservation, please contact our customer service team at our contact page.