Privacy Policy

1. Who We Are

Cherished Wedding Venues is a trading name of Cherished Group Limited, a company registered in England and Wales and based in Stamford, Lincolnshire. Cherished Group Limited ("we", "us", "our") operates the website cherishedweddingvenues.com (the "Site") and is the data controller for the personal data described in this policy.

We are a wedding venue directory connecting couples with venues in the UK and internationally.

For any data protection queries, please contact us at: privacy@cherishedweddingvenues.com

2. What Data We Collect

We may collect and process the following personal data:

Information you provide to us

• Name, email address, and phone number (when making an enquiry)
• Wedding date, number of guests, and venue preferences
• Account registration details (name, email, password)
• Venue listing information (if you are a venue owner)
• Payment and billing information (processed securely via Stripe)
• Messages sent through our enquiry and messaging systems
• Newsletter subscription details

Information we obtain from other sources

• Venue listing and contact details taken from published sources — see section 6.
• Guest details supplied by a couple using our planning tools — see section 7.

Information collected automatically

• IP address and approximate location
• Browser type, operating system, and device information
• Pages visited, time spent on pages, and navigation paths
• Referring website or search terms
• Cookie identifiers (see our Cookie Policy)

3. How We Use Your Data

We use your personal data for the following purposes:

• To provide our services: Connecting you with wedding venues, processing enquiries, managing your account.
• To communicate with you: Responding to enquiries, sending booking confirmations, service updates.
• To improve our platform: Analysing usage patterns, troubleshooting issues, developing new features.
• To personalise your experience: Showing relevant venue recommendations, remembering your preferences.
• To process payments: Handling subscription payments for venue owners (via Stripe).
• To send marketing communications: Newsletter, venue recommendations, and promotions (only with your explicit consent).
• To comply with legal obligations: Tax records, fraud prevention, responding to lawful requests.

4. Legal Basis for Processing

Under the UK GDPR, we rely on the following legal bases:

• Contract: Processing necessary to fulfil our service agreement with you (e.g., forwarding enquiries to venues).
• Consent: For marketing communications, analytics cookies, and advertising cookies. You can withdraw consent at any time.
• Legitimate interest: Improving our services, preventing fraud, site security, and building and maintaining our venue directory — including contacting venues about their own listings. See Where We Get Venue Information From.
• Legal obligation: Where we are required by law to process your data.

5. Data Sharing

We share your personal data with the following categories of recipient. Some of them are outside the United Kingdom; where that is the case we say so, because it matters to your rights.

Who receives what you send us

• Wedding venues: when you submit an enquiry, your name, email, phone number, wedding date, guest numbers, budget range and message are sent to the venue you selected. If that venue has not yet claimed its listing, we send the enquiry to the venue's publicly listed contact address.
• Our group companies: enquiries and contact-form messages are also forwarded to the Sporting Escapes Group central lead system, which handles enquiry follow-up for our group. Only enquiries where you ticked the privacy box are forwarded.

Service providers who process data on our behalf

• Base44 — the platform this Site is built on. It hosts the Site, stores our database and handles sign-in, so effectively all of the personal data described in this policy sits with Base44. Outside the UK.
• Postmark — sends our email (enquiry notifications, confirmations, account email, newsletters and venue campaigns) and keeps a record of what was sent, to whom, and whether it bounced or was unsubscribed. Outside the UK.
• Stripe — processes subscription and booking payments, and handles identity verification for venue owners who take payouts. We never see or store your full card details. Outside the UK.
• Cloudflare — serves our images and provides the anti-bot check on our sign-up and sign-in pages. Outside the UK.
• Sentry — error monitoring, when enabled. It is configured not to collect personal data: identifying fields are stripped before anything is sent, and session recording is switched off. Outside the UK.
• Google — Google Analytics 4 (only if you accept analytics cookies; your IP address is anonymised), Google Fonts (which receives your IP address when a page loads), and Google Places, which we use to check and complete venue listing details. Outside the UK.
• Artificial-intelligence features: some optional features — drafting a reply to an enquiry, writing a venue description, generating a run sheet — send the relevant content to a large language model through our platform provider. Where you use one of these on an enquiry, that enquiry's contents are included.

We do not sell your personal data. We do not serve advertising on this Site at present; if that changes we will update this policy and ask for your consent first.

6. Where We Get Venue Information From

Most of the venues in our directory did not give us their details themselves. We build listings from information that is already published — a venue's own website, its public business listings, and business information services such as Google Places. Where a venue's published contact details are a named person rather than a general office address, those details are personal data, and this section explains what we do with them.

What we hold

• The venue's business name, address, website and published contact email and phone number.
• Where published, the name and role of a contact at the venue (for example "Events Manager").
• Descriptive listing information: capacity, facilities, photographs and pricing where these are published.

What we use it for, and on what basis

We use it to publish a listing for the venue so couples can find it, and to contact the venue once to invite it to claim and correct that listing. Our lawful basis is legitimate interests: our interest in building a useful directory, and the venue's own interest in being findable and in controlling what is said about it. We have weighed this against the privacy of the individuals whose published work contact details we hold, and we limit ourselves to business contact information used for a business purpose.

Your right to object

You can object at any time, and we will act on it. Every email we send about a listing carries a one-click unsubscribe link: using it stops all further marketing email from us to that address, permanently. If you would also like the listing itself removed, or the contact details deleted, email privacy@cherishedweddingvenues.com and tell us which venue. You do not have to give a reason.

You have the same rights over this information as anyone else does over their personal data — see Your Rights below.

7. Wedding Guest Information

Couples who use our planning tools can build a guest list and collect RSVPs through a wedding website we host for them. If you are a guest replying to one of those invitations, this section is about you.

• The couple provides your name, and may add your email address, phone number and relationship to them.
• When you reply, we store your response, any plus-one you name, and anything you write in the free-text boxes — including dietary requirements and accessibility needs.
• Dietary and accessibility information can reveal things about your health or your religious beliefs. We collect it only because you have chosen to tell the couple, and we use it only to pass it to them and to help them plan. We do not use it for anything else and we do not share it with anyone but the couple.

The couple decides what to collect and how long to keep it; we host it for them. If you want your details corrected or removed, the quickest route is to ask the couple. You can also contact us at privacy@cherishedweddingvenues.com and we will help.

8. Data Retention

• Account data: Retained while your account is active, deleted within 30 days of account deletion.
• Enquiry data: Retained for 24 months after the enquiry date.
• Analytics data: Retained for 14 months (Google Analytics default).
• Marketing consent records: Retained for 3 years from consent date.
• Payment records: Retained for 7 years for tax compliance.

9. Your Rights

Under UK GDPR, you have the right to:

• Access: Request a copy of your personal data.
• Rectification: Ask us to correct inaccurate data.
• Erasure: Request deletion of your data ("right to be forgotten").
• Restriction: Ask us to limit how we process your data.
• Portability: Receive your data in a structured, machine-readable format.
• Object: Object to processing based on legitimate interests or direct marketing.
• Withdraw consent: Where processing is based on consent, withdraw at any time.

To exercise any of these rights, email privacy@cherishedweddingvenues.com. We will respond within one month, as required by the UK GDPR. If your request is complex we may extend that by up to two further months, and we will tell you within the first month if we need to.

10. Security

We implement appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect your personal data, including encrypted connections (HTTPS/TLS), secure password hashing, access controls, and regular security reviews. However, no method of transmission over the Internet is 100% secure.

11. Children's Privacy

Our services are not directed at individuals under 16. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children. If you believe we have collected data from a child, please contact us immediately.

12. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will notify you of significant changes by posting a notice on our Site or by email. The "Last updated" date at the top indicates when this policy was last revised.

13. Contact & Complaints

If you have any concerns about how we handle your personal data, please contact us at privacy@cherishedweddingvenues.com.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), the UK's independent authority for data protection.