Privacy notice

Who is responsible for your data

The data controller for this website is The Media Den Limited, which publishes CompareVillas — a company registered in England and Wales (company number 14235678), registered office: F29 Flexspace Newton Aycliffe Incubation Centre, Durham Way South, Aycliffe Business Park, Newton Aycliffe, DL5 6XP, United Kingdom. If you have any question about your data, email hello@comparevillas.com — a person, not a form, will reply within five working days.

What we collect — and why

Right now, only two things:

• Your email address, if you join our newsletter. We collect it only when you type it in and press the button — that's your consent, and it's our lawful basis (UK GDPR Article 6(1)(a)). We use it to send you the newsletter you asked for, nothing else. Every email includes an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing removes you promptly.
• Standard server logs. Like almost every website, our hosting records basic technical data when a page is requested — IP address, browser type, pages visited, timestamps. We use this for security and to keep the site running (our legitimate interest, UK GDPR Article 6(1)(f)). Logs are kept only as long as needed for those purposes and are not used to profile you.

What we don't collect

We also don't buy data about you, combine your data with other sources, or use your data for automated decision-making.

Who we share data with

Newsletter emails are stored and sent by our email service provider, which processes your address on our instructions under a data-processing agreement — it may not use your email for its own purposes. Our hosting provider processes server logs on the same basis. We never sell or rent your data, and we don't share it with villa companies, platforms or advertisers.

If a provider processes data outside the UK, we ensure appropriate safeguards recognised under UK GDPR (such as adequacy regulations or standard contractual clauses) are in place.

How long we keep it

• Newsletter email: until you unsubscribe, then removed from our active list.
• Server logs: retained for a short rolling period for security, then deleted.
• Emails you send us: kept as long as needed to deal with your query, and to keep a record of corrections and complaints.

Your rights under UK GDPR

You have the right to:

• Access — ask for a copy of the data we hold about you;
• Rectification — have inaccurate data corrected;
• Erasure — ask us to delete your data;
• Restriction and objection — limit or object to how we use it;
• Portability — receive your data in a usable format;
• Withdraw consent — at any time, for anything based on consent (unsubscribing from the newsletter does this).

To exercise any of these, email hello@comparevillas.com. There's no charge, and we'll respond within one month.

Complaints to the ICO

If you're unhappy with how we've handled your data, we'd ask you to contact us first so we can put it right — but you always have the right to complain to the UK's data protection regulator, the Information Commissioner's Office, at ico.org.uk.

Changes to this notice

If we change what we collect or how we use it, we'll update this page and change the date at the top. Meaningful changes — like introducing analytics — will be flagged clearly on the site, with consent sought first where the law requires it.