Privacy Policy

SaunaTrail is Ireland’s sauna directory. This policy explains what personal data we collect, why we collect it, who we share it with, how long we keep it, and the rights you have. It covers saunatrail.ie and the emails we send. We use personal data only for the purposes described here, and we make no decisions about you by automated means. We have written it in plain English on purpose. If anything is unclear, ask us at privacy@saunatrail.ie.

Who we are

SaunaTrail (“SaunaTrail”, “we”, “us”) is operated from Ireland by its founder, Greg Dolan, who is the data controller for the personal data described in this policy. You can reach us at any time at privacy@saunatrail.ie for anything to do with your data, or at hello@saunatrail.ie for everything else.

The short version

• You can browse the whole directory without an account and without cookies. Our visitor statistics are cookieless and are designed so that we cannot pick you out from them.
• We publish information about sauna businesses, including details and reviews that are already public elsewhere, so that people can find and compare them. Businesses can claim their listing and correct it at any time.
• When you contact us, we use what you send us to reply. We email you news and offers only if you ask us to, and you can stop at any time.
• We do not sell personal data, and we use no advertising or tracking cookies.
• Our data is kept within the European Economic Area where we have the choice, and we use a short list of established providers, described below.

If you browse the directory

Visitor statistics

We keep our own lightweight statistics so we know which pages, counties and listings are popular and can tell venue owners how their listing is doing. We run it ourselves rather than through a third-party analytics service, and it uses no cookies. It records which pages and listings are viewed, the type of interaction, the website you arrived from, and a coarse device type.

The record of a visit is pseudonymised: we do not store your IP address, and a visit cannot be linked to you or to your visits on other days. We also use IP addresses briefly to protect the site from abuse, without storing them. Raw events are deleted automatically after 35 days; only anonymous daily totals are kept after that.

Our lawful basis is our legitimate interest in understanding how the directory is used.

Technical data

Like every website, ours produces standard technical logs at our hosting provider, including IP addresses and the pages requested. They are used only to keep the service running and secure, and are kept for a short period. The map on our home page is drawn by a third-party map service that your browser contacts directly, so it receives your IP address in the same way any website you visit does. Our lawful basis for both is our legitimate interest in running a working, secure site.

Links to other sites

Listings link out to venues’ own websites, social media pages, phone numbers and map directions. Once you follow one of those links you are on someone else’s service and their privacy policy applies, not ours.

If you contact us

Our contact form asks for your name, your email address, the sauna you are writing about if there is one, and your message. We use these to read and reply to you, and for nothing else, unless you also tick the box asking for news and offers. If you email us directly instead, the same applies.

Our lawful basis is our legitimate interest in answering the people who write to us, and where your message is a step towards listing a business with us, taking steps at your request before entering into an agreement.

News and offers

Where a form offers it, you can ask us to email you occasional news and offers from SaunaTrail. The box is never ticked for you. If you tick it, we keep your name and email address for that purpose, with a record of when you asked, and every such email tells you how to stop them. Account holders can also switch this on or off from their account page. Our lawful basis is your consent, which you can withdraw at any time without affecting anything else.

If you run, or work at, a sauna we list

What a listing contains

Each listing holds the business’s name, address, location, contact details, opening hours, description, type, amenities, prices where known, photographs and reviews. Most of this is information about a business rather than a person. Where a business is run by an individual, some of it (a name, a phone number, an email address, an image) may be personal data, and this section explains how we treat it.

Where listing information comes from

We build and maintain the directory from three sources:

• Public sources. Information the business has already published, such as its own website, its social media pages and public business listings.
• The business itself. Owners who claim their listing can edit every detail and upload their own photographs from their dashboard.
• Our own research and editing. We write and tidy descriptions, sometimes with the help of an AI writing tool (see “AI-assisted tools” below).

Our lawful basis for publishing business information is our legitimate interest, and the public’s, in a complete and accurate directory of saunas in Ireland. Where an item is personal data we balance that interest against the impact on the individual, and we give every business a straightforward way to correct or remove anything: claim the listing and edit it, or write to us and we will do it for you.

Inviting businesses to claim their listing

If we list your business and it has not been claimed, we may write to the address the business has published to tell you about the listing and how to take control of it or have it changed or removed. Every such email carries a one-click link to opt out, which we honour for any future campaign, and you can object at any time by writing to us.

Our lawful basis is our legitimate interest in telling the businesses we list about their listing and inviting them to manage it. We send it as a notice about the listing we hold, and the email links to this policy.

Reviews

Reviews shown on a listing are copied from public review platforms and consist of the reviewer’s public display name, star rating, review text and the month it was written; very long reviews are shortened. We do not currently accept reviews directly. We publish them under our legitimate interest, and the public’s, in showing what visitors have said about a venue. We have no way to contact reviewers individually, so this policy is our notice to you. If you wrote a review and would prefer it not to appear here, or it is out of date or wrong, tell us at privacy@saunatrail.ie and we will remove it. You do not need to give a reason.

Photographs

Photographs of a venue are shown publicly on its listing. A business can replace or remove photographs from its dashboard at any time, and anyone who appears in a photograph, or who owns one, can ask us to take it down.

If you have an owner, staff or admin account

Accounts are for people who manage listings. You sign in with a magic link, a one-time link we email to you, so we never hold a password for you. We keep:

• your name, email address and, if you give it, phone number;
• whether you have asked for news and offers (see above), and when you asked or stopped;
• what you send us when you claim a listing or submit a new one, and our decision;
• which listings you manage, in what role, and the email address of anyone you invite to help;
• the listing content you create or edit, and a history of those changes;
• the emails and dashboard messages we send you, and our internal notes about a listing;
• records of your use of the dashboard’s tools.

Our lawful basis is the agreement under which you use the dashboard, and our legitimate interest in keeping an accurate record of who changed what.

AI-assisted tools

We use an AI service to draft accessibility descriptions for photographs and, when an owner asks, to suggest improved listing text. Listing content and photographs are sent to that service for the purpose; account details are not. The provider may process this outside the European Union, under the safeguards described below.

Our lawful basis is the agreement under which you use the dashboard and, for alt text, our legitimate interest in a directory that screen readers can describe.

Bookings

SaunaTrail does not take bookings. If you book a session with a venue, by phone, by email or on the venue’s own website, the venue handles your details under its own privacy policy.

Promoted listings

Some listings are shown in promoted positions, such as the Spotlight on our home page, and are labelled as promoted. Promoting a listing involves no additional personal data beyond the account of the person who arranged it.

Cookies

The public directory sets no cookies. If you sign in to a dashboard we set essential sign-in cookies so that you stay signed in; they are required for the service to work and need no consent banner. We use no advertising, analytics or tracking cookies, and no third-party cookies.

Who we share data with

We do not sell or rent personal data, and we do not share it with advertisers. To run SaunaTrail we use a small number of established service providers, who handle data on our behalf under their published data-processing terms: website hosting and content delivery, a database and sign-in service, email delivery, our business email, an AI service for the tools described above, and a map service that your browser contacts directly. They are based in the European Economic Area and the United States. A list of our current providers is available on request.

Where a provider processes data outside the European Economic Area, the transfer is covered by the EU-US Data Privacy Framework where the provider is certified under it, or by the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses. We may also disclose data where the law requires it, or to protect the rights, safety or property of SaunaTrail, our users or others.

How long we keep it

How we protect it

All traffic to and from SaunaTrail is encrypted, access to data is restricted to the people who need it and enforced at the database level, and we hold no passwords. No system is perfectly secure. If a breach ever affected you, we would tell you and the Data Protection Commission as the law requires.

Your rights

Under the GDPR you have the right to:

• ask for a copy of the personal data we hold about you;
• ask us to correct anything that is wrong;
• ask us to delete it, where we have no continuing need or obligation to keep it;
• ask us to restrict how we use it while a question is resolved;
• object to processing based on legitimate interests, including to any invitation email;
• receive the data you gave us in a portable form, where we process it on the basis of an agreement with you.

To exercise any of these, email privacy@saunatrail.ie. We will reply within one month. If a request comes from an address we do not recognise, we may ask you to confirm your identity first, because handing personal data to the wrong person would be worse than a short delay.

You also have the right to complain to the Irish supervisory authority, the Data Protection Commission, at dataprotection.ie. We would appreciate the chance to resolve any concern first.

Children

SaunaTrail is a directory of businesses and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has given us data, tell us and we will delete it.

Changes to this policy

We will update this policy as the service grows, and always before a change that affects how we use your data takes effect. The current version, with its date, always lives at this address.

Contact

Data protection questions and requests: privacy@saunatrail.ie. Anything else: hello@saunatrail.ie or the contact page.