Privacy policy: how we use information about you.

The University of Edinburgh Hospitality & Events Collection, a division of UOE Accommodation Ltd which is a wholly owned subsidiary of The University of Edinburgh, holds name and contact details about anyone who applies for, is offered and who enters into a contract for our commercial services and products; including hotel and self-catered accommodation, conferences and events, weddings, and catering services.

We use the information about you:

  • because it is necessary to administer your bookings, to generate contract(s) between us and to communicate with you about your bookings (contract);
  • only when agreed by you on an opt-in basis, we can provide you with information about our products and services and can gather feedback information from you to better inform operational and strategic planning needs (consent);
  • to comply with UK immigration legislation, registration cards should be completed for anyone who is staying in our accommodation and who is over 16 years of age; the information required consisting of name and, as required, all or some of all or some of address, contact details, nationality and passport number (legal obligation)

The University of Edinburgh Hospitality & Events Collection uses an external company that provides us with hosted website services but which does not store personal data; The University of Edinburgh Hospitality & Events Collection remains responsible for the information and will ensure it is kept securely.

We will not share your data with any other third party unless there is a legal obligation to do so.

For reasons of financial compliance, we will hold the personal data you provided us for a maximum of 7 years (the current year plus 6 previous years), but we anonymise and archive all personal data unless you have specifically opted in to agree to us using this data for marketing purposes.

Mandatory data sharing

In addition to the primary purposes, we are also legally obliged to share certain data with other public bodies such as HMRC and will do so where the law requires this; we will also generally comply with requests for specific information from other regulatory and law enforcement bodies where this is necessary and proportionate.

Transfers outside the EEA

The University will only transfer data to countries outside the EEA when satisfied that both the party which handles the data and the country it is processing it in provide adequate safeguards for personal privacy.

Your rights

You have the right to request access to, copies of and rectification or erasure of personal data held by The University of Edinburgh Hospitality & Events Collection and can request that we restrict processing or object to processing as well as the right to data portability (i.e. the right to ask us to put your data into a format that it can be transferred easily to a different organisation). If you wish to make use of one of these rights, please email your local contact.

If we have asked for your consent in order to process your personal data you can withdraw this consent in whole or part at any time. To withdraw consent, please email your local contact at events@ed.ac.uk who will explain the consequences of doing so in any particular case and initiate proceedings for withdrawing consent.

Data controller and contact details

For data collected under this privacy notice, UOE Accommodation Ltd is the Data Controller (as that term is defined in the UK General Data Protection Regulation and the Data Protection Act 2018), registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office, Registration Number Z6426984.

You can contact our Data Protection Officer at dpo@ed.ac.uk. Our data protection policy is on our website at http://www.ed.ac.uk/records-management/data-protection/data-protection-policy

Complaints

If you are unhappy with the way we have processed your personal data you have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at casework@ico.org.uk but we ask that you raise the issue with our Data Protection Officer first.

Cookies

We may collect information about your computer, including where available your IP address, operating system and browser type. This information is statistical data about users' browsing actions and patterns, does not identify any individual. It is used to inform improvements to the website.

For the same reasons, we may obtain information about your general internet usage by using a cookie file which is stored on the hard drive of your computer. We use this information to track your movements through the Site, to find out how the Site is being used and to assess its usefulness. Personal information about you is not collected during the tracking process.

For more information on cookies please see:

We use a third party product "Google Analytics", a web analytics service provided by Google, Inc. ("Google"), to help us analyse how our Site is used. In doing so information about your use of our Site, including your IP address, may be transmitted to, and stored by, Google. This information will be subject to Google's Privacy Policy.

We use session cookies that will hold your data on our site until such time as you leave.

You may refuse to accept cookies by activating the setting on your browser which allows you to refuse the setting of cookies. However, if you select this setting you may be unable to access certain parts of the Site.

We use another three third party services on uoecollection.com:

  • AddThis.com – these cookies are used to allow you to share our pages with your social networks
  • Twitter.com - this cookie allows you to add one of our pages into your twitter feed
  • Tripadvisor.co.uk – we use a widget from TripAdvisor to give you access to the latest consumer reviews and ratings across our accommodation properties, for more please visit TripAdvisor’s cookie policy page.

If you have any concerns regarding the use of cookies on our site please don’t hesitate to contact us on +44 (0)131 651 2189 or email reservations@ed.ac.uk .

We are currently working towards introducing Optanon cookie opt-out software.

For more visit The University of Edinburgh Privacy & Cookies policy page.