Privacy Policy

About Essex Lodges

Essex Lodges is a small, independent directory of log cabins, lodges, and cottages across Essex, the Dedham Vale, and the wider Stour and Blackwater countryside. We help visitors find properties worth booking, then send them across to the booking partner that handles the stay.

This policy covers the limited personal information we receive when you use the site, and what you can ask us to do with it.

What We Collect

Contact Form Messages

If you send us a message through the contact form, we receive the name, email address, and message content you chose to share. The form is processed by Web3Forms, which passes each submission to us by email so we can reply. We use this information to answer your enquiry and nothing else.

Cloudflare Analytics

Essex Lodges is delivered through Cloudflare, which provides privacy focused, cookieless analytics. This records anonymous, aggregate information such as page views, referring site, approximate country or region level location, and device class. It cannot identify you as an individual, it does not follow you between websites, and no cookies are set for analytics purposes. Cloudflare's own privacy policy covers how they handle this data on their side.

Server Logs

Our hosting and CDN provider keeps short term access logs for security and abuse prevention, which is standard practice for any website. These logs are not used to build visitor profiles and are not shared with third parties for marketing.

When You Click Through to Book

Every property listing on Essex Lodges links out to one of our booking partners, such as Sykes Cottages or Snaptrip. The moment you click "Check Availability" you leave our site and enter theirs.

From that point, the partner's own privacy policy and cookie practices apply to your session, not ours. If you want to understand how those partners process your booking data, their policies are published on their own sites.

Your Rights Under UK GDPR

You have the right to ask for access to any personal data we hold about you, ask for inaccurate details to be corrected, ask us to delete what we hold, object to how we use it, and lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner's Office if you feel we have mishandled anything.

In practice, because we only hold contact form messages, these requests almost always come down to finding and deleting an email thread. We are happy to do that.

How Long We Keep Things

We retain contact form messages for up to 12 months so we can follow up on enquiries and answer repeat questions. Analytics data is aggregated, anonymous, and carries no individual identifiers. We do not build behavioural profiles.

Changes to This Policy

If we change how we handle data, we will update this page and refresh the "last updated" date at the top. There will not be many changes, because the site is deliberately kept light on data collection.