Butterfly Farm Bed & Breakfast takes the privacy of your data seriously, and takes measures to ensure, to the best of our ability, its safety and security when using the website Butterfly-farm.biz. As such, we make all efforts to comply with the Australian Privacy Principles, the European General Data Protection Regulations and the privacy requirements of other countries.
As an accommodation provider we necessarily collect personal and financial details from our guests to allow bookings to be made and payments to be taken, and our website also collects various technical details during your visit.
How do we collect the information?
In common with other websites, our site collects information during your visit via your browser's interaction with our site. This information is collected automatically by our webserver, hosted in Sydney Australia.
Our website uses the WordPress content management system, which uses "cookies" in its operation. For your privacy we minimise cookie usage; cookies used by our website, and your control over them, are described in our cookie policy.
Your direct actions in making a booking or general inquiry provides us with additional information.
Bookings and general inquiries can be made directly to our email address, postal address or telephone.
Accommodation bookings can also be made through several accommodation booking websites which pass on your booking information to Butterfly Farm:
We refer you to the above websites for the privacy and other policies of each of these organisations.
What information do we collect?
When visiting the Butterfly Farm website, our web server and a system plugin collects information that allows us to determine the following:
- Your IP address;
- Time of visit;
- Duration of visit per page;
- Operating system;
- Browser used;
- Referring website (if you clicked a link to come to Butterfly Farm);
- Entry webpage (the page you first viewed);
- Pages viewed during your visit;
- Exit webpage (the last page you viewed on our site);
- Search phrase used (if you arrived from a search engine, although increasingly not provided).
Butterfly Farm only uses logging and analytics solutions from our hosting company which are collected directly from the website server. We do not use external services such as Google Analytics. The analytics generally work best by providing overall summaries rather than exploring individual visits. We use the analytics to determine trends, such as our most popular pages, the countries that most visitors come from, and what search engines are visiting our site.
When making a general inquiry, depending on the inquiry method, we may collect:
- Your email address;
- Time of sending the email;
- Your name;
- Dates of your intended booking;
- Any additional information that you choose to provide, such as number of people and dietary requirements.
When you make a booking, we may collect:
- First and last names;
- Contact phone number;
- Email address (in some cases – see below);
- Postal/home address;
- Number of guests in your party;
- Booking dates;
- Credit card details for pre-authorisation;
- Reservation number;
- Special requests.
Note that with email correspondence via Expedia.com and Booking.com any email contact is through the internal email systems of these sites, not directly from your own email address. The only personal information we collect from these systems is whatever you choose to make available to us.
Guests are issued with a Unique Guest Identifier for use in any future correspondence - this helps us readily identify you in the event of follow-up queries or information requests after you have stayed with us. This identifier is kept confidential and is not held on the website.
What do we do with your information?
We use the supplied information to make bookings at our B&B, to pre-authorise credit cards (in some cases), and to collect payment for our accommodation services.
We do not send marketing materials to guests – your name and email is not added to a marketing database.
If you receive unsolicited marketing emails (spam) purporting to originate from Butterfly Farm, be assured these are NOT from us but from someone forging or "spoofing" our email address – unfortunately quite simple to do.
Embedded Content
Butterflyfarm.biz contains embedded content from Vimeo. This content is sourced directly and as such behaves as it would on the host website, including the placement of cookies (see our cookie policy). This content is also subject to the privacy policies of the site which is independent of the Butterfly Farm privacy policy.
Vimeo privacy policy
Butterfly-farm.biz uses some text fonts provided by Google.com. These fonts are hosted locally on the website, not remotely.
Do we share your information?
A web-based booking calendar is shared to local tourist information centres. This does not provide any personal information, simply showing which nights the rooms in our B&B are booked.
Butterfly Farm DOES NOT share any personal information we collect with any other parties except:
- Where required by law – such as a police investigation;
- Where non-payment or fraud has occurred with your booking, in which case your details may be passed to police, bank, credit card or other relevant authorities;
- Where an email may assist our web developer with processing information requests or following up technical issues.
Information security
Our webserver uses a secure certificate to provide browsing security. Most browsers will automatically recognise Butterfly Farm as a secure website.
We maintain our email through Bigpond.com, a major Australian email provider and make use of its email security systems.
Access to our email account is via the secure https protocol, however, please be aware that email communication is inherently insecure, and a message may pass through multiple servers, each or any of which may store copies of the message.
We do not store emails locally at the B&B but may on occasion print out an email to assist with inquiries. These printouts are destroyed after use.
Credit card details
We are able to access your credit details via online services for a period of fourteen (14) days after first use. After this time the information becomes inaccessible to us online, however in cases where payment has been declined or delayed we may take an offline copy of the details for followup with the credit provider.
We use Australia's Commonwealth Bank for all credit card processing through Visa and Mastercard.
Information retention
We maintain any direct email correspondence for a period of up to seven (7) years to facilitate any repeat contact, or to make any necessary contact after you leave – for example to notify of items left behind.
We retain booking information – name, booking dates, guest identifier, number of guests for a period of seven (7) years in a hardcopy ledger. This is kept securely in a part of our farmhouse not accessed by guests.
We maintain a paper-based guest book for guests to comment on their stay. By entering your name and any other personal details in this book you understand and accept that the information may exist in perpetuity.
Requests for your information, or for information to be deleted
We believe it is important that personal information provided to us is accessible by you to ensure its accuracy and to assure you of the extent of the information we hold about you.
Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Eurpoean Union citizens can request access to their information and request its removal. We are happy to comply with such requests, and also requests for access to personal information from citizens of other countries.
However, to protect our data from misuse, and for the privacy of our visitors and guests, any such requests may be required to provide identifying details of the information requested, and to verify your identity to our satisfaction before any action is taken.
Where providing, modifying or deleting your information occasions us expenses from our web developer and/or hosting company, non-EU citizens may be required to pay these expenses prior to the information being forwarded or deleted.
Data Breaches
Under Australian and EU regulations we are obliged to promptly report any data breaches we identify. We maintain various security measures on our website and email to provide a high level of security. We will endeavour to make you aware if we believe your personal information has been compromised.
Complaints
In the first instance please contact us, and be assured we will do our best to correct any issues. If you are not satisfied with our response you can complain to the Information or Privacy office in your own country.
This policy may be updated for compliance with changing regulations.
See also:
Terms and Conditions
Cookie Information
Information Requests
