Privacy Policy

Effective Date: 01 December 2025

This Privacy Policy describes (1) our collection, use, storage, retention, transfer, and disclosure of your personal data, and (2) our cookies policy.

By using Gastro Trails’ website and services, you agree to the collection and use of information in accordance with this Privacy Policy.

By signing up for, or otherwise using the website and any of our Services, you indicate that you have read and understand our Terms and Conditions and our Privacy Policy and agree to abide by them at all times. If you do not agree with any of our Terms and Conditions or our Privacy Policy, then you must not use the Site or access any of its Content.

ABOUT US

This website (https://gastrotrails.guide, the “Site”) is owned and operated by Gastro Trails Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales under registration number 14327006, whose registered office address is 71- 75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London, WC2H 9JQ, United Kingdom, and is trading under the name “Gastro Trails” (“we”, “our”, and “us”).

“Gastro Trails” and “Site” refers to the website operated by or on behalf of Gastro Trails Ltd. Gastro Trails Ltd is the data controller and can be contacted at: support@gastrotrails.guide

PERSONAL DATA WE COLLECT

We only collect data that helps us achieve the purpose set out in this Privacy Policy. We will not collect any additional data beyond the data listed below without notifying you first.

Data Collected in a Non-Automatic Way / Information You give Us

While using Gastro Trails, we ask you to provide Us with certain personally identifiable information by:

1. Filling forms in our Site
2. Joining our mailing list
3. Registering for an Account
4. Registering for one of our paid-membership Subscriptions
5. Answering / Completing questionnaires (about your travel preferences and about specific trip preferences for the itinerary that you want to create)
6. Providing feedback or corresponding with us by email or by using the relevant form in our Contact Us page

The information you provide may include your first and last name, email address, and a display name / nickname / pseudonym that will be used as your username.

Additionally, we may ask you to provide your billing address, phone number, and any other personal information required in order for us to create a contract with you for our paid memberships / Subscriptions.

We ask our users to opt-in (i.e., consent) to providing information about their preferences in food, beverages, accommodation, experiences, and travelling. These are used by our recommendation engine when filtering the list of establishments in our catalogue to those we think each user will enjoy the most. The User can decide how much information to share by (1) opting out and simply selecting a generic profile they want to be associated with, or (2) skipping any of the questions they don’t feel comfortable in answering. We inform our users about the potential deterioration of the quality of our recommendation engine’s suggestions in case of incomplete questionnaires, but our users can still use our Service if they decide to opt-out / not consent to sharing information about their preferences.

Data Collected Automatically / Information We Collect about You

When you visit and use our Site, we may automatically collect and store the following information:

1. Technical information, including the IP address used to connect your computer to the internet, your login information, browser type and version, time zone setting, browser plug-in types and versions, operating system, and platform.
2. Usage information about your visit, including details about the pages viewed during your visit, page response times, page interaction information, duration of the visit to certain pages, request response errors.

Data Collected from Third Parties / Information We Receive about You

We may receive personal data about you from:

1. Our suppliers such as payment solution providers who process Gastro Trails’ subscription payments
2. Social media logins to our Site (e.g., “Sign in with Google” or “Sign in with Facebook”)

HOW WE USE YOUR PERSONAL DATA

Gastro Trails may use personal data for the following purposes:

• To administer our Site and Services, including to monitor their usage and their performance
• To manage your Account and your Subscription(s)
• To improve our Site and Services so that they are effective and efficient
• To generate a list of suggested establishments for your itineraries. We use the personal preferences you shared with us to filter our list of establishments to those we think will suit you best
• To manage your requests to Us
• To contact you about critical service or support notifications or updates that may affect your use of the Site
• To provide you with news, updates, new establishment inclusions in our Site, special offers, competitions, and other information, unless if you have opted to not receive them
• We may use Your information for other purposes, such as data analysis, identifying usage trends, determining the effectiveness of our promotional campaigns and to evaluate and improve our Services, marketing practices, and Your / the user-experience
• We may use Your information to evaluate or conduct a merger, divestiture, restructuring, reorganization, dissolution, or other sale or transfer of some or all of Our assets, whether as a going concern or as part of bankruptcy, liquidation, or similar proceeding, in which Personal Data held by Us about our users is among the assets transferred
• We may use Your personal data to facilitate communications between you and third-party service providers, deal with enquiries, and carry out our obligations arising from any contracts entered into between you and us

DATA SECURITY - How We Store and Protect Your Personal Data

The security of your Personal Data is very important to Us and we take all reasonable precautions to ensure that the data is secure and that users are protected, but no method of transmission over the Internet, or method of electronic storage is 100% secure, and therefore, we are unable to guarantee the security of User data beyond what is reasonably practical.

We are using browser encryption (https) in all of our pages.
We have controls and rules around the creation of user passwords.
We are storing personal data in secure servers following recommended best practices in terms of access controls, data segregation, encryption and/or pseudonymisation (in transit and at rest), and recovery procedures.

We have procedures in place to alert Us of any suspected personal data breach and will notify you and any applicable regulator of a breach where We are legally required to do so.

The information that We collect from you, including Your personal data, may be transferred to, and stored at, a destination outside of the European Economic Area (“EEA”). It may also be processed by staff operating outside the EEA who work for us or one of our suppliers. Such staff may be engaged in the provision of our services, the processing of your payments, or the fulfilment of any orders. When we transfer data, we will ensure that the appropriate safeguards are in place in accordance with GDPR (and any subsequent data protection legislation). By submitting your personal data to us, you agree to this transfer, storing or processing. We will take all steps that we consider are reasonably necessary in the interests of your information being processed securely and in accordance with this Privacy Policy when transferred outside the EEA.

We do not collect or store any credit card details in our servers. Electronic payments are processed by well- known third-party payment solution providers.

DATA RETENTION - How Long We Keep Your Personal Data

Gastro Trails will retain Your personal data until the purposes (set out in this Privacy Policy) the data was collected for has been achieved. We will retain and use Your personal data to the extent necessary to comply with Our legal, regulatory, accounting or reporting requirements.

We may also anonymise your personal data (so that it can no longer be associated with you) for research or statistical purposes. Anonymised data may be used indefinitely without further notice to you. By way of example, we may continue using your answers to food and travel preferences in our statistical analyses.

DATA DISCLOSURE - When and To Whom We May Disclose Your Personal Data

We may disclose user data to any Gastro Trails employee or sub-contractor who reasonably needs access to user data to achieve the purposes set out in this Privacy Policy.

We may share your data with other third parties in the following situations:

1. If the law requires it
2. If it is required for any legal proceeding
3. To prove or protect our legal rights
4. To our services providers, business partners, suppliers, and sub-contractors:
   By way of example, we use (1) Amazon Web Services’ (“AWS”) Cognito service for user authentication and its Simple Email Service (EMS) for emailing; and (2) Stripe for online payments processing.
5. 1. For the provision of IT, system administration services, website hosting and support services.
   2. For the performance of any contract we enter into with them or you, and for payment processing.
5. To buyers or prospective buyers of Our company in the event that we are involved in a merger, acquisition, business or asset sale.
6. In public areas of the Gastro Trails website: your username and any other personal information You decide to share with other users in the form of comments, feedback or messages in any of the interactive areas of our Site may be viewed by all users and may be publicly distributed outside.
7. For any other purpose with Your consent.

GDPR

For users in the European Union, we adhere to the Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016, known as the General Data Protection Regulation (the "GDPR"). For users in the United Kingdom, we adhere to the GDPR as enshrined in the Data Protection Act 2018.

We have not appointed a Data Protection Officer as we do not fall within the categories of controllers and processors required to appoint a Data Protection Officer under Article 37 of the GDPR.

Consent

By using our Site You agree that you consent to the conditions set out in this Privacy Policy and the Terms and Conditions.

When the legal basis for us processing your personal data is that you have provided your consent to that processing, you may withdraw your consent at any time. If you withdraw your consent, it will not make processing which we completed before you withdrew your consent unlawful.

You can withdraw your consent by selecting the relevant option in the Account Dashboard or by emailing us at support@gastrotrails.guide

Legal Basis for Processing

We rely on the following legal bases to collect and process the personal data of users in the EU:

1. Consent: Users have provided their consent to the processing of their data for one or more specific purposes
2. Contract: processing of user personal data is necessary for Us to take, at the request of a User, steps before entering a contract or for the performance of a contract to which a User is a party. By way of example, without the user’s first name, last name, and email we would not be able to create an Account for them and provide our Services

Your Rights as a User

Under the GDPR, you have the following rights:

1. Right to be informed: be informed about the collection and use of Your personal data.
2. Right of access: access and receive a copy of Your personal data.
3. Right to rectification: have inaccurate personal data rectified.
4. Right to erasure: have Your personal data erased (“right to be forgotten”).
5. Right to restrict processing: request the restriction or suppression of Your personal data.
6. Right to data portability: request to receive personal data you have entered in our system in a structured, commonly used, and machine-readable format. We may charge a small reasonable fee towards the cost of administering your request. As a security measure to ensure that personal data is not disclosed to any person who does not have the right to receive it, we will have to verify your identity before responding to your request. We aim to respond to requests within one month (after receiving payment and verifying your identity).
7. Right to object: object the processing of Your personal data at any time.

If you would like to exercise any of your rights or find out more, please contact us at support@gastrotrails.guide.

If you have a concern or complaint about the way we handle your data, we ask that you contact us in the first instance to allow us to investigate and resolve the matter as appropriate. If you think that we have not resolved the matter and you want to make a complaint, the UK supervisory body is the Information Commissioner’s Office (“ICO”).

COOKIE POLICY

A cookie is a small file, stored on a user's hard drive by a website. Its purpose is to collect data relating to the user's browsing settings and/or habits. You can choose to be notified each time a cookie is transmitted. You can also choose to disable / block cookies entirely in your internet browser, but this may decrease the quality of your user experience and you may not be able to access some parts of our Site and some of our Services.

At Gastro Trails we have tried to keep the use of cookies to the absolute minimum required for us to provide our Service to you.

• Strictly necessary cookies: these are functionally necessary for the operation of our Site as they are used to authenticate your Account and subsequently authorise your use of our Services
• • __Secure-next-auth.callback-url (expires at the end of the session)
  • __Host-next-auth.csrf-token (expires at the end of the session)
• Analytical / Performance cookies: these help us improve the quality and the performance of our Site and/or Services by identifying which pages / Services of the site are working as intended and which are not proving to be as useful or performant as we want. Based on these findings we prioritise the relevant enhancements and improvements that would make the use of our site and Services better for our users.
• • We use Google Analytics to collect impersonal information about website traffic and its sources. Their cookies expire in 2 years. You can read more about Google’s Privacy Policy here: https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en

Please note that third parties (including, for example, advertising networks and providers of external services like web traffic analysis services) may also use cookies, over which we have no control. These cookies are likely to be analytical/performance cookies or targeting cookies.

LINKS TO THIRD PARTY WEBSITES

Gastro Trails may contain links to third-party websites and applications. By clicking a third-party link, you will be redirected to their website / service, and you may be allowing those third parties to collect or share your personal data.

We have no control over these third-party websites and applications and assume no responsibility for their content, privacy policies or practices. You should review those third parties’ privacy policies to understand what personal information they collect and how they use it.

CHILDREN PRIVACY

We do not knowingly collect or use personal data from children under 16 years of age. If we learn that we have collected personal data from a child under 16 years of age, the personal data will be deleted as soon as possible. If a child under 16 years of age has provided us with personal data their parent or guardian may contact us at support@gastrotrails.guide.

CHANGES TO THIS PRIVACY POLICY

We may amend Our Privacy Policy from time to time in order to maintain compliance with the law and to reflect any changes to our data collection process. When we amend this Privacy Policy we will update the "Effective Date" at the top of this page.

We may notify users by email of changes to this Privacy Policy but we recommend that our users periodically review our Privacy Policy to ensure that they are notified of any updates.