We only collect the minimum amount of information required to process your booking, brochure request or payment. We use cookies ( detailed later in this document ) to store small pieces of information such as a session identifier and cottage shortlist data which expires automatically after a few hours. We store no personal data or long term tracking data in our cookies, only temporary session data. Payment details are stored encrypted whilst on our systems and more details of our policy regarding are detailed later in this document.
Once you submit a form to us online containing payment details they are heavily encrypted and stored on our online systems. Every few minutes a seperate secure offline system downloads that data and purges it from the online systems where it will then wait to be processed by a member of our staff. Once a payment has been processed the card details are completely purged from our system. We see no reason to hoard card details, a lot of companies store the last 4 digits however those are usually the most unique part of the card number! So we do not store anything post processing. It is of course in our interests to keep this sort of data as safe as possible - for if a breach did occur there would be very serious repurcussions for us ( as it would for any company ) let alone the damage to our reputation so lets just say we take every precaution and are always looking for new ways to even further improve upon them. If you are weary of online card submission then please feel free to book with us over the phone during business hours, contact details here.
We use Google analytics to measure traffic to the site, including where a "click" came from and which pages are visited when a customer visits the site. This helps us improve the site and our external advertising as we are able to determine which areas of the site are less well visited and which methods of advertising are not working and improve them. Google use their own non-invasive tracking technologies for this purpose which include cookies however they do not collect personal data or otherwise interfere with the operation of the site. Google analytics is widely used and considerered safe however if you wish to disable it you can do so by following the instructions here - note that this will disable Google analytics for all sites not just Cornish Cottages. More information on Google analytics in general is available here.
Cookies are small peices of temporary information which websites store on your computer, usually for session reference storage or tracking / logins. We use a cookie to store a unique session reference number, which in turn is used on our systems to store search parameters, cottage filter settings, shortlist data and login status. The site relies on this cookie for some functionality such as when making a booking and persisting filter settings through multiple page loads. Our cookies are very short lived, they will typically completely expire after 24 hours. Third party cookies ( cookies not belonging to the site you are visiting ) get some bad press as they are quite often involved with invasive tracking however we do not use those types of third party cookies, only Google analytics as mentioned above which uses its own cookie for its own purposes and not related to Cornish Cottages. We DO NOT make use of flash cookies which are a special type of super persistent cookie often used by adversiting networks. More information on cookies in general is available here
When taking potentially sensitive information from you, we use an SSL3 encrypted connection which secures the transaction from being able to be "snooped" upon. This secure connection is enabled automatically when you enter an area of the site which may deal with sensitive information, and disabled automatically when you click away to a non-sensitive area of the site. When this secure connection is activated, you should see the tell-tale sign of a "Padlock" icon in your web browsers status or address bar.
We will never email you unless you have signed up to our newsletters. When making a booking or submitting a brochure request there is a tick box for subscribing to our newsletter - if you are receiving marketing emails from us then you most likely ticked those boxes when submitting a form to us. We will NEVER share your email address with third parties, and if you contact us telling us not to send you marketing emails we will remove you from our list. Generally we only send out newsletters every few months, certainly we know how anoying it is to be receiving them every day or week so we only send them out when we have something good to say.
