Privacy Policy

This privacy notice tells you what to expect when The Metropole Hotel collects personal information.

The Metropole Hotel and Spa are committed to complying with the General Data Protection Regulation and the Data Protection Act 2018. Looking after the personal information you share with us is very important, and we want you to be confident that your personal data is kept safely and securely and to understand how we use it.

We have published this notice to help you understand:

• how and why we collect information from you
• who we share your information with, why and on what basis
• what your rights are.

If we make changes to this notice we will notify you by updating it on our website. The Metropole Hotel will be what is known as the ‘Data Controller’ of the personal data you provide to us, and we will sometimes refer to ourselves in this notice as “we” or “us”. By Data Controller, this means The Metropole Hotel determines the purposes and way in which any personal data are, or will be, processed.

Should you need to contact us please write to: The Metropole Hotel and Spa, Temple Street, Llandrindod Wells, Powys, LD1 5DY or via info@metropole.co.uk quoting Privacy Information Enquiry.

PAYMENTS

We take payments for Gift vouchers and bookings through partner company Stripe which manage online and telephone payments. We accept Visa, Mastercard and American Express.

WHAT INFORMATION DO WE COLLECT AND WHY?

When you buy goods from us, you are entering into a contract with us.

When placing an order for gift vouchers for example, we will ask you to provide some personal information such as;

• full name, address, contact number, email address and
• payment card authorisations are stored separately from all profiles via a random encrypted code.

When placing an accommodation booking for example, we will ask you to provide some personal information such as;

• full name, address, contact number, email address and
• any booking requests, such as dietary, accessibility, preferences and
• payment card authorisations, which are stored separately from all profiles via a random encryption code. This makes it impossible to retrieve your card details.

In order to undertake website personalisation, we will also gather information about the devices you use to access our sites (desktop and mobile), and this may include IP address. For further information on our use of cookies and tracking please see our Cookie Notice.

HOW DO WE USE YOUR INFORMATION?

We will use personal information about you for a number of purposes, including:

• to advise you of any changes or problems with your hotel booking
• to help us to administer accounts, services and products which we offer
• to help detect fraud or loss
• to notify accommodation confirmation and reminder notification of your booking.
• to write to you (including electronic mail) or to telephone you with information about our services or products or offers. This information is sent to you normally via electronic mail in the form of an e-newsletter more than once a month.

Data Protection says that we are allowed to use and share your personal data only where we have a proper reason to do so. The law says we must have one or more of these reasons and these are:

• Contract – your personal information is processed in order to fulfil a contractual arrangement e.g. in order to send you your hotel brochure.
• Consent – where you agree to us using your information in this way.
• Legitimate Interests – this means the interests of us in managing our business to allow us to provide you with the best products and service in the most secure and appropriate way e.g. to transfer your data to our distribution agency for the delivery of our hotel brochures.

WHO WE SHARE YOUR INFORMATION WITH AND WHY

Delivery Partners – In order for you to receive your goods and services, The Metropole Hotel works with the following companies;

• Voucher delivery – Enjovia
• Accommodation booking system – Guestline
• E-newsletter – Createsend

We do not sell or disclose your personal information to other companies without your prior consent. We do not sell mailing lists to third parties. If you do not wish to be contacted by us or receive the members’ newsletter, please contact us.

Protection of information
We maintain strict security measures in order to protect personal information. This includes following certain procedures, for example encrypting data on our websites and in order to ensure compliance with all applicable legal requirements.

Keeping in touch with you

We want to keep you up to date with information about our member properties and special offers. We will always ask you if you want to receive this type of marketing information.

We will not share your information with companies outside of The Metropole Hotel for their marketing purposes.

If you decide you do not want to receive this marketing information you can request that we stop by writing to the address provided above, emailing info@metropole.co.uk or by calling 01597 823700, or the unsubscribe link within the email.

You may continue to receive mailings for a short period while your request is dealt with.

VISITORS TO OUR WEBSITES

When someone visits www.metropole.co.uk we collect standard internet log information and details of visitor behaviour patterns. We do this to find out things such as the number of visitors to the various parts of the site. We collect this information in a way which does not identify anyone. We do not make any attempt to find out the identities of those visiting our website. We will not associate any data gathered from this site with any personally identifying information from any source. If we do want to collect personally identifiable information through our website, we will be up front about this. We will make it clear when we collect personal information and will explain what we intend to do with it.

USE OF COOKIES BY THE METROPOLE

Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer by websites that you visit. They are widely used in order to make websites work, or work more efficiently, as well as to provide information to the owners of the site.

Most web browsers allow some control of most cookies through the browser settings. To find out more about cookies, including how to see what cookies have been set and how to manage and delete them, visit www.allaboutcookies.org.

To opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics across all websites visit http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.

SEARCH ENGINE

The search engine on our website is designed to be as powerful and easy to use as the popular search engine Google. The search is made possible by a piece of hardware (a search ‘appliance’) supplied by Google that is plugged into our server and continuously indexes the content on our site. All search requests are handled by the appliance and the information is not passed on to any third party, including Google.

PEOPLE WHO MAKE A COMPLAINT TO US

When we receive a complaint from a person we make up a file containing the details of the complaint. This normally contains the identity of the complainant and any other individuals involved in the complaint. We will only use the personal information we collect to process the complaint and to check on the level of service we provide.

We usually have to disclose the complainant’s identity to whoever the complaint is about. This is inevitable where, for example, the accuracy of a person’s record is in dispute. If a complainant doesn’t want information identifying him or her to be disclosed, we will try to respect that. However, it may not be possible to handle a complaint on an anonymous basis. We will keep personal information contained in complaint files in line with our retention policy. This means that information relating to a complaint will be retained for four years from closure. It will be retained in a secure environment and access to it will be restricted according to the ‘need to know’ principle.

Similarly, where enquiries are submitted to us we will only use the information supplied to us to deal with the enquiry and any subsequent issues and to check on the level of service we provide.

PEOPLE WHO USE THE METROPOLE SERVICES

The Metropole may offer various services to the public. For example, we send out publications and distribute an electronic newsletter. We use a third party to deal with some publication requests, but they are only allowed to use the information to send out the publications.

We have to hold the details of the people who have requested the service in order to provide it. However, we only use these details to provide the service the person has requested and for other closely related purposes. For example, we might use information about people who have requested a publication to carry out a survey to find out if they are happy with the level of service they received. When people do subscribe to our services, they can cancel their subscription at any time and are given an easy way of doing this.

COMPLAINTS OR QUERIES

The Metropole tries to meet the highest standards when collecting and using personal information. For this reason, we take any complaints we receive about this very seriously. We encourage people to bring it to our attention if they think that our collection or use of information is unfair, misleading or inappropriate. We would also welcome any suggestions for improving our procedures.

This privacy notice was drafted with brevity and clarity in mind. It does not provide exhaustive detail of all aspects of Metropoles collection and use of personal information. However, we are happy to provide any additional information or explanation needed. Any requests for this should be sent to the address below.
Access to personal information

The Metropole tries to be as open as it can be in terms of giving people access to their personal information. Individuals can find out if we hold any personal information by making a ‘subject access request’ under the Data Protection Act 1998. If we do hold information about you we will:

To make a request to the Metropole for any personal information we may hold you need to put the request in writing addressing it to our Internal Compliance Team, or writing to the address provided below. If you agree, we will try to deal with your request informally, for example by providing you with the specific information you need over the telephone. If we do hold information about you, you can ask us to correct any mistakes by, once again, contacting the Internal Compliance Team.
Disclosure of personal information

In many circumstances we will not disclose personal data without consent. However when we investigate a complaint, for example, we may need to share personal information with the organisation concerned and with other relevant bodies.

You can also get further information on:

agreements we have with other organisations for sharing information;
circumstances where we can pass on personal data without consent for example, to prevent and detect crime and to produce anonymised statistics;
our instructions to staff on how to collect, use and delete personal data; and
how we check that the information we hold is accurate and up to date.

LINKS TO OTHER WEBSITES

This privacy notice does not cover the links within this site linking to other websites. We encourage you to read the privacy statements on the other websites you visit.
Changes to this privacy notice. We keep our privacy notice under regular review. This privacy notice was last updated on 23 April 2012.
How to contact us. Requests for information about our privacy policy can be emailed to the Internal Compliance Department or by writing to:

The Metropole Hotel, Temple Street, Llandrindod Wells, Powys, LD1 5DY

This privacy section was updated on 21 May 2018