Privacy and Cookies Policy

Customer’s personal data is collected from:

• Anyone making a booking
• Anyone calling any of our reservations or groups team
• All guests staying with us
• Any visitors to our properties
• Businesses/Clients
• Anyone who posts a publicly available review online about one of our properties. 

We also collect personal data from all Clink Hostels employees or business partners/collaborators.
Employees should refer to Clink’s Employee Privacy Notice for details.

In most cases we collect and process personal information so that we can receive & respond to enquiries; make, amend & administer room bookings, process & store payment details, provide access to other products and services (such as meals), provide existing customers with information about our properties and to give them access to special offers and to gather customer feedback, including from online reviews posted by guests after their stay in one of our properties, which helps us to improve the services that we offer and to improve our customers’ experience whilst visiting or staying at one of our premises.

A lot of the information we collect is essential for processing and confirming reservations made with us and to analyse and respond to customer reviews.

The information we collect includes but is not exclusively the:

• Guest name
• Telephone number
• Date of birth – asked for at check-in
• Gender
• Nationality
• ID (passport, driving licence) -required only at check-in
• Email
• Date of arrival and departure
• Credit card details, including the CVV number (3-digit number on the back of the card) when a booking is made over the phone or via our secure online platform, Mews
• The post-stay review data we collect consists of the username/handle, the review text and metadata from publicly posted reviews on online travel agent and review websites.

Upon arrival at one of our hostels, we require the same information on all guests staying with us to aid in a smooth and easy check-in.

We keep personal data for different amounts of time based on our retention policies the type of data, reasonable periods during which we have a legitimate business interest to retain it and legal requirements.
This is explained in more detail in our full privacy Policy summarised below:

• Customer personal data: 3 years or less in some instances
• Business Contact personal data: no more than 1 year following last use unless consent is given for a longer period
• Employee personal data: as required by law

Clink Hostels may use your data for marketing purposes, i.e. in order to inform you of its services which may, according to your past preferences, be of interest to you. These communications shall strictly adhere to applicable legal regulations.

Advertising and marketing materials of the Contracting or other parties shall be sent to you only if you opted in for these communications during the registration process, via e-mail or otherwise.

Your decision about direct marketing may be withheld in accordance with the opt-out rules described in each marketing e-mail or other form of communication. Opting out can be done via changing the settings of your User account or by directly contacting our Data Protection Officer at [email protected]. Should you opt out, Clink Hostels shall retain only such data necessary for provision of services in accordance with the rules set out in this policy.

Your personal data shall not be shared or provided without your consent to any third party except in the following situations: (a) data is necessary for provision of services – for example credit card details will be exchanged with your bank for your booking to be confirmed (b) Clink Hostel’s is obliged to provide the personal data on the basis of law or upon order by a public authority, or (c) it is specifically allowed by applicable legal regulations.

By submitting your information to us, you consent to the use of that information.

At any point while we are in possession of your personal data you have the following rights:

• You have the right to object to certain types of processing such as direct marketing
• You have the right to object to automated processing, including profiling
• You have the right to request a copy of the information that we hold about you
• You have the right to ask us to correct the data that we hold about you that is inaccurate or incomplete
• In certain circumstances you can ask for the data we hold about you to be erased from our record
• Where certain conditions apply you have the right to ask that we restrict the processing of your personal data
• You may have the right to have the data we hold about you transferred to another organisation
• Right to judicial review: if Clink Hostels refuses your request under rights of access. Note: we will always provide you with a reason as to why we have refused your rights request
• You have the right to complain as outlined on the  Data Protection Commission website www.dataprotection.ie and by email at [email protected]

Note: Rights requests will be forwarded on to a third party if one is involved in the processing of your personal data.

Clink Hostels will make every effort to ensure that your personal data is stored securely.
The aim is to eliminate unauthorised or unlawful processing of your personal data, or accidental, unauthorised or unlawful access, use, transferring, processing, copying, transmitting, alteration, loss or damage of your personal data. Despite all efforts and meeting all rules set out by applicable legal regulations, it is not possible to guarantee the security of your data, if it is transferred or transmitted in an unsecured way.
For this reason, we have introduced adequate physical, technical and organisational measures and plans to protect and secure all information collected by our services using

• Using Cryptography, where necessary;
• Using password protection, where necessary; and
• Restricting access to your personal data (i.e. access to your personal data is granted only to those employees or personnel for whom the access is indispensable for the purposes described in this document and in our full privacy policy).

We require that our partners, who provide supporting services that help us to store and otherwise process your personal data, apply the same high level of protection to your data.

Note: These measures do not remove your duty to secure your own personal data. You should, inter alia, regularly change your passwords and should never use predictable usernames and/or passwords, share your password with other persons, or grant access to your User account and/or disclose your personal data to other persons.

Clink shall, from time to time, change and update the terms of this Privacy policy. These changes will be posted here.

Should you wish to know more about Clink Hostels, its protection of your privacy, or about this Privacy policy, you can contact the Data Protection Officer at [email protected]

Please contact the Data Protection Officer at [email protected] if there is any data privacy and protection matter with which you are dissatisfied.

If you remain unhappy with the handling of your case, then you have the right to contact the Data Protection Commission as follows:

By phone: +353 1 7650100 or 1800 437737
Website: www.dataprotection.ie
Email: [email protected]

Please contact our Data Protection Officer at [email protected] for any further information about how we protect your privacy.

Our website uses cookies, as almost all websites do, to help provide you with the best experience we can.
Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer or mobile phone when you browse websites.

Our cookies help us:

• Make our website work as you’d expect
• Remember your settings during and between visits
• Improve the speed/security of the site
• Allow you to share pages with social networks like Facebook
• Personalise our site to you to help you get what you need faster
• Continuously improve our website for you
• Make our marketing more efficient (ultimately helping us to offer the service we do at the price we do)

We do not use cookies to:

• Collect any personally identifiable information (without your express permission)
• Collect any sensitive information (without your express permission)
• Pass personally identifiable data to third parties

You can learn more about all the cookies we use below.

If the settings on your software that you are using to view this website (your browser) are adjusted to accept cookies we take this, and your continued use of our website, to mean that you are fine with this. Should you wish to remove or not use cookies from our site you can learn how to do this below, however doing so will likely mean that our site will not work as you would expect.

Website function cookies
Our own cookies
We use cookies to make our website work including:

• Making our booking process work
• Remembering your search settings
• Remembering if you have accepted our terms and conditions
• Tailoring content to your needs
• Remembering your preferences such as dates and hostel location
• Remembering if we have already asked you certain questions (e.g. you declined to use our app or take our survey)

There is no way to prevent these cookies being set other than to not use our site.

Third-party functions

Our site, like most websites, includes functionality provided by third parties. A common example is an embedded YouTube video. Our site includes the following which use cookies:

• YouTube – Privacy Policy powers the videos on our site

Disabling these cookies will likely break the functions offered by these third parties

Social website cookies

So you can easily “Like” or share our content on the likes of Facebook and Twitter we have included sharing buttons on our site.

Cookies are set by:

• Facebook – Privacy Policy

The privacy implications on this will vary from social network to social network and will be dependent on the privacy settings you have chosen on these networks.

Site improvement cookies

We may, from time to time, test new designs or site features. We do this by showing slightly different versions of our website to different people and anonymously monitoring how our site visitors respond to these different versions. Ultimately this helps us to offer you a better website.

We use:

• Hotjar – Privacy Policy

Visitor statistics cookies

We use cookies to compile visitor statistics such as how many people have visited our website, what type of technology they are using (e.g. Mac or Windows which helps to identify when our site isn’t working as it should for particular technologies), how long they spend on the site, what page they look at etc. This helps us to continuously improve our website. These so called “analytics” programs also tell us how people reached this site (e.g. from a search engine) and whether they have been here before helping us to put more money into developing our services for you instead of marketing spend.

We use:

• Google Analytics – Privacy Policy / Google Analytics Cookie Usage

Advertising cookies

Cookies are widely used in online advertising. Neither us, advertisers or our advertising partners can gain personally identifiable information from these cookies.

You can learn more about online advertising at http://www.youronlinechoices.com. You can opt-out of almost all advertising cookies at http://www.youronlinechoices.com/uk/your-ad-choices although we would prefer that you didn’t as, ultimately, adverts help keep much of the internet free. It is also worth noting that opting out of advertising cookies will not mean you won’t see adverts, just simply that they won’t be tailored to you any longer.

We use:

• DoubleClick – Privacy Policy owned by Google

You may notice that sometimes after visiting a site you see increased numbers of adverts from the site you visited. This is because advertisers, including ourselves pay for these adverts. The technology to do this is made possible by cookies and, as such, we may place a so called “remarketing cookie” during your visit. We use these adverts to offer special offers etc to encourage you to come back to our site. Don’t worry, we are unable to proactively reach out to you as the whole process is entirely anonymous. You can opt out of these cookies at anytime as explained above.

We have a number of partners who promote our service on a success-only basis (i.e. instead of paying for advertising, we pay them commissions on sales). Cookies are required to allow us to reward these partners and these cookies are usually provided by specialist companies (known as affiliate networks). Neither us, the networks, or the partner advertising or recommending our services are able to identify you personally. We ask you to support us by allowing these cookies which ultimately help us to offer you the service we do at the price we do. 

Managing cookies & turning cookies off

You can usually switch cookies off by adjusting your browser settings to stop it from accepting cookies (Learn how here). Doing so, however, will likely limit the functionality of ours and a large proportion of the world’s websites as cookies are a standard part of most modern websites.

It may be that your concerns around cookies relate to so called “spyware”. Rather than switching off cookies in your browser you may find that anti-spyware software achieves the same objective by automatically deleting cookies considered to be invasive. Learn more about managing cookies with antispyware software.

The cookie information text on this site was derived from content provided by Attacat Internet Marketing. For more information about cookies, visit www.aboutcookies.org which includes useful information on cookies and how to block cookies using different types of browsers. Please note that by blocking or deleting cookies, you may not be able to take full advantage of our websites.