Privacy

Authentic Villa Holidays Ltd, 141 Crouch Hill, Crouch End, London N8 9QH, registered in England and Wales under company number 04499989, is the data controller for the personal information described here.

For anything about your data, write to sales@authenticvillaholidays.com or call +44 (0)20 8888 6655.

• Your name, email address and telephone number, when you enquire or book.
• The details of your booking: property, dates, party size, and any requirements you tell us about.
• Anything you choose to put in an enquiry message.
• If you ask about letting your villa through us: your name, contact details, where the villa is, and whatever you tell us or upload about it, including photographs.
• What you type into the automated villa search, if you use it. See clause 06.
• Payment information, handled by our payment providers. We do not store full card numbers.
• Basic technical information about your visit to this site, such as pages viewed and the browser used.

Where a booking involves people other than you, we will hold their names and any requirements relevant to the stay. Please make sure they know you have given them to us.

To arrange and service your booking. We need your details to make the reservation with the property owner and to look after you before and during the stay. This is necessary to perform our contract with you.

To meet our legal and accounting obligations. Booking and payment records are kept because we are required to keep them.

To run and improve the site. If you allow analytics when the site asks, we see how pages are used and improve them. This rests on your consent — asked before anything runs, withdrawable on the cookies page.

To send you occasional news and offers. Only with your consent, and you can withdraw it at any time. See clause 08.

Sometimes a booking requires information about health, mobility or diet: a ground-floor bedroom, an allergy, an accessible bathroom. We use it only to arrange what you have asked for, share it only with the people who need it to deliver that, and hold it with your explicit consent. You do not have to give it, but we may not be able to guarantee the arrangement without it.

• The owner or local manager of the property you are booking: they need your name, dates and party details to receive you.
• Suppliers arranging something you have asked for, such as a transfer company, chef or boat operator.
• Our payment providers, and our accountants and auditors.
• Microsoft (Clarity) and Meta (the pixel), our analytics providers: only if you have allowed analytics, and only the page-use data described on the cookies page.
• OpenRouter and Anthropic, who run the language model behind the automated villa search: only what you type into that search. See clause 06.
• Resend, who deliver our transactional email: an enquiry you send us is emailed to our team through them, so it passes through their systems on the way. For a villa-owner enquiry the email to our team carries only your name and the villa's location; everything else stays on our own systems.
• Law enforcement or regulators where we are legally required to.

We do not sell your personal information, and we never have.

This site has a villa search you can use in your own words: you describe the holiday you are after and it suggests villas. It is automated. Your messages are interpreted by software, not read by a member of the team.

To work out what you are looking for, the text you type is sent to OpenRouter and Anthropic, the companies whose language model interprets it. They process it on our behalf, and the transfer safeguards in clause 07 apply.

We keep a copy of these conversations on our systems for up to twelve months, then delete them. We read them to understand what people actually ask for — the places, dates and kinds of villa we are asked about — and to improve the search and the selection of villas we offer. This rests on our legitimate interests, and you can object (clause 08). Your browser’s own copy still lasts only for the visit and is gone when you close the tab.

It only needs holiday details. Please do not type payment details, or the kind of health information described in clause 04, into it: for anything like that, speak to us directly.

Most of the properties we let are outside the UK, so arranging a booking usually means sending your details to an owner or supplier in that country. Where we transfer personal data outside the UK, we do so on the basis of UK adequacy regulations or, where those do not apply, appropriate safeguards such as the UK’s International Data Transfer Agreement.

Under UK data protection law you have the right to:

• Ask what we hold about you, and receive a copy.
• Have inaccurate information corrected.
• Ask us to delete information we no longer need.
• Ask us to restrict how we use it, or object to our using it.
• Receive information you gave us in a portable form.
• Withdraw consent at any time, where we relied on consent.

Write to sales@authenticvillaholidays.com. We respond within one month. There is no charge unless a request is clearly unfounded or excessive.

You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office, the UK supervisory authority, at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113. We would rather you came to us first, but you do not have to.

Booking and financial records are kept for six years after the end of the stay, which is the period our accounting and tax obligations require. Enquiries that do not become bookings are kept for two years, on our own systems, whether or not you go on to book. Conversations with the automated villa search are kept for up to twelve months (clause 06), after which they are deleted automatically. Enquiries from villa owners are kept for two years on our own systems. Marketing consent is kept until you withdraw it.

We hold your information on access-controlled systems and limit it to the people who need it. No system is perfect, and we do not pretend otherwise.

If a breach occurs that is likely to risk your rights and freedoms, we will report it to the Information Commissioner within 72 hours of becoming aware, and will tell you directly where the risk to you is high.

Cookies are covered separately. Please see our cookie notice. In short: the ones needed to make the site work are always on, and anything else runs only if you agree to it.

When we change this notice we update the review date at the top. Where a change materially affects how we use information we already hold, we will tell you directly rather than rely on you re-reading this page.