Privacy Policy

• Your account — name, email, phone, country, and a photo if you add one. If you sign in with Google or Facebook, we receive your name and email from them.
• Your bookings and listings — dates, guest numbers, prices, and the boats you list or book.
• Messages you send to Owners or guests through the Platform.
• Payments — card payments are processed by Stripe. We never see your full card number; we keep the amounts, the payment status and Stripe's reference for each booking. If you list a boat, Stripe collects your identity and bank details to pay you, and we keep only your Stripe account reference and whether it is ready to receive payouts.
• Launch list — if you ask us to tell you when we launch, your email address and whether you signed up as a guest or a boat owner. It joins the list only after you click the confirmation link we send.
• Technical logs — IP address and browser details, kept for security and to diagnose errors.

To run bookings and listings, to let you and the other party contact each other, to send service emails about your account and trips, to keep accounts secure, and to fix things when they break. If you joined the launch list, to email you when we launch; every such email has an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing removes you from the list. That's it — we don't use your data to build advertising profiles.

The legal bases, under the GDPR, are:

• Performance of a contract — your account, bookings, messages, payments and refunds, and the service emails about them.
• Legal obligation — keeping the financial and tax records the law requires, and responding to lawful requests from authorities.
• Legitimate interest — keeping the Platform secure, preventing fraud and abuse, and fixing errors.
• Consent — Google Analytics cookies, and the launch list. You can withdraw consent at any time.

• The other party to a booking. When a booking is made, the Owner and the guest can see each other's name and contact details — they need to be able to reach each other.
• Stripe — processes card payments and pays Owners.
• OVHcloud — hosts our servers and our database, and keeps encrypted backups of it, in data centres in France.
• Cloudflare — serves the website and the photos you upload (stored in the European Union), keeps a second encrypted backup of our database in the European Union, and forwards email sent to our chartermeister.com addresses to our team.
• Brevo — sends our emails, and keeps the launch list.
• Sentry — collects error reports so we can fix bugs.
• Google Analytics — measures site usage, and only if you accept cookies. Reject and nothing is ever sent to Google.

We don't sell your personal information, and we don't share it for advertising.

We use no tracking cookies unless you agree to them, and we run no advertising trackers at all. We never sell your data or share it with advertisers.

Always on, and not optional: signing in stores a short-lived token in your browser's local storage and a secure sign-in cookie, so you stay logged in. Signing in with Google or Facebook also sets a security cookie for a few minutes, which confirms the sign-in was started by you. Your display-currency choice and cookie decision are saved in local storage. These are needed for the site to work and are not used to track you.

Only if you accept: Google Analytics, which tells us how many people visit and which pages they use, so we can improve the site. It sets a cookie in your browser. If you choose Reject — or simply never answer — it is never loaded: no script runs, no cookie is set, and nothing is sent to Google. The site works exactly the same either way.

You can change your mind at any time from the cookie settings page.

Our servers, our database and its backups are in the European Union. But Charter Meister LLC is a United States company, and several of the services above also process data in the United States. If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, your data is therefore transferred there. We rely on the safeguards our providers offer for this, such as the EU Standard Contractual Clauses and, where a provider has joined it, the EU–US Data Privacy Framework. Ask us if you want details for a specific provider.

We keep personal data only for as long as we need it for the purposes described in this policy. When a retention period ends, we delete the data or anonymise it so that it can no longer be linked to you.

• Booking and payment records — 7 years from the end of the tax year in which the booking took place. We are required to keep these records under United States tax and accounting law. They include booking confirmations, invoices, amounts, dates, and the transaction references returned by our payment processor. We never store full card numbers; card data is handled entirely by Stripe.
• Account data — while your account is active, and for 3 years after your last activity. This covers your name, email address, phone number and the preferences saved on your profile. If you ask us to delete your account sooner, we will do so, except for records we are required to keep under the period above.
• Support correspondence — 3 years from the date of the last message, so that we can handle any dispute or follow-up relating to a booking.
• Marketing consent — until you withdraw it. You can unsubscribe at any time using the link in any email we send, or by writing to us.
• Server and security logs — 12 months.

We keep data beyond these periods only where a legal obligation, a tax or accounting requirement, or an ongoing legal claim requires it. In that case we keep only what is needed for that specific purpose.

To ask us to delete your data, write to chartermeister.hq@gmail.com.

You have the right to:

• access the personal data we hold about you and get a copy;
• correct data that is wrong or incomplete;
• erase your data, where we have no legal reason to keep it;
• receive your data in a portable format (portability);
• object to processing based on our legitimate interest, and to restrict processing;
• withdraw consent at any time, without affecting what happened before.

You can view and edit your details in your account settings at any time. For anything else, email chartermeister.hq@gmail.com; we reply within one month.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority — in the country where you live or work, or where you think your rights were breached. We would appreciate the chance to put it right first.

Deleting your account removes it from the Platform. We keep booking records where we need them for legal or accounting reasons, or where an Owner needs them for a trip that already happened.

Passwords are hashed and never stored in readable form. Access to the database is restricted. We take reasonable precautions, though no online service can promise perfect security.