StayVale hosts guest guidebooks for accommodation owners. This page says exactly what we hold and why. It describes the service as it actually works rather than reserving rights we do not use.
What we hold about hosts
Only what the service needs to run:
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| Your email address | It identifies your guides, and it is how you get back into them. |
| Guide content: name, tagline, location, welcome note, sections and details you write | It is the guide. It is shown to your guests. |
| Images and video you upload, and your host name, photo and phone if you add them | Shown in your guide, at your choice. You decide what goes in. |
| Your chosen template and colour | Renders the guide. |
| A subscription reference from our payment provider | Tells us your guide is paid for. |
| Session tokens | Random values that keep you signed in. They contain nothing about you. |
If you sign in with Google we receive your email address from Google and use it only to find the guides that belong to you. We ask Google for nothing beyond your address and basic profile, and we do not keep a Google token afterwards.
We do not hold your card details. Payments are taken by Polar, which acts as merchant of record; your card never reaches our servers.
What we hold about your guests
Nothing. A guest opening a guide is not asked to sign in, is not given a tracking cookie, and is not counted. There is no analytics script on the guide reader or on this site, from us or from anyone else. We do not log guest IP addresses.
The practical consequence is that we cannot tell you how many guests opened your guide. That is a deliberate trade, and we would rather say so than quietly measure people who never agreed to it.
Who else sees it
These companies process data so the service can function:
- Cloudflare serves the pages and stores uploaded images and video.
- Amazon Web Services hosts the server and database.
- Polar takes payments as merchant of record and holds billing details.
- Resend delivers email we send you, such as a sign-in link.
- Google confirms your identity if you choose Sign in with Google.
We do not sell your data, and we do not share it for advertising. Nobody receives it for their own purposes.
How long we keep it
- Guide content stays until you delete it or ask us to.
- Sign-in links expire within thirty minutes of being issued.
- Sessions expire after thirty days.
- Expired sessions, used links and processed billing events are cleared automatically every hour.
Your rights
You can ask for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it and your guides with it. Write to the address below and we will act within thirty days. We will not ask you to justify the request.
If you are in the UK or the EU, you also have the right to complain to your data protection authority.
Cookies
We set cookies only to keep you signed in and to protect the sign-in flow against cross-site request forgery. They are strictly necessary, they carry no advertising or analytics purpose, and there is nothing to opt out of.
Contact
Email [email protected] for anything on this page, including access and deletion requests.
If we change this page we will update the date at the top. Material changes will be emailed to hosts with a live guide.