Privacy policy

TailHaus is a doggy daycare and dog hotel at Mooi Uitsig Farm, R45 Malmesbury Road, Paarl, 7646. We are the responsible party for the personal information you give us through this website, by WhatsApp, by email or in person. You can reach us, and our information officer, at info@tailhaus.co.za or +27 72 492 9387.

When you book or contact us, we collect:

• your name, email address, phone number and billing address;
• your dog's name, breed, birth month and any notes you give us, such as diet, medication or behaviour;
• your answers about vaccinations and sterilisation, and whether it's your dog's first visit;
• an emergency contact's name and phone number;
• your bookings: what you booked, the dates, what you paid and your messages to us;
• if you allow analytics cookies, how you found us (for example a Google search or an ad you clicked), the pages and services you look at, what's in your basket and how far you get through booking, and your device type and browser.

We don't collect your card or bank details. Payments are made on Payfast's secure pages, and Payfast tells us only whether a payment went through.

• to take, confirm and look after your bookings, and to send you booking emails, invoices and reminders;
• to care for your dog safely, and to reach you or your emergency contact if we need to;
• to show you your bookings, dogs and invoices on My bookings;
• to answer your questions and send you photo pupdates of your dog;
• to see how people find us and which of our ads work, if you allow it;
• to keep the records the law requires, such as tax invoices.

We never sell your information. We share it only with the service providers who help us run TailHaus, and only what they need:

• Payfast, to process your payments;
• our website and booking system's hosting provider;
• our email delivery provider, to send booking emails;
• Saffary Digital, who build and maintain this website and booking system, and run our booking and visitor reports (Saffary Insights). For every booking they receive what you booked and paid, your first name and town, and a scrambled form of your email address and phone number that can't be turned back into them, so we can recognise returning clients. If you allow analytics cookies, they also receive the visit details above. If you book in the same visit as an ad or link brought you, the booking also records that ad or campaign, whatever you chose; nothing is stored on your device for it. Saffary stores this in the European Union (Frankfurt, Germany);
• if you allow ad measurement, the ad platforms whose ads led to your booking, such as Google and Meta: we tell them about the booking with your email address and phone number scrambled, your IP address and your browser, so they can match it to their ad.

Some of these providers store information outside South Africa. When they do, we make sure it is protected to the standard POPIA requires. We may also share information when the law requires it.

Your browser keeps a few things you'd expect: your basket, your sign-in to My bookings (for 30 days, or until you sign out), and your dog's breed and emergency contact so you don't have to type them again at checkout. Your dog's health answers are never kept on your device.

The first time you visit, we ask which cookies you allow:

• analytics: sv_id, a random visitor number, and sv_touch, how you first and last found us (for example a Google search, or an ad you clicked), so we can count visits and see which of them lead to bookings;
• ad measurement: letting us tell ad platforms such as Google and Meta when one of their ads led to a booking;
• personalised ads: letting ad platforms use your visits to choose the ads you see.

If you choose only the necessary cookies, we keep just your answer, in a cookie called sv_consent, store nothing else on your device and don't follow you between visits. Your answer and these cookies last 13 months. You can change your answer at any time with Cookie settings at the bottom of every page.

Whatever you choose, we count, without identifying anyone, how many visitors accept or decline cookies, to know how much of our traffic we can measure.

Links to WhatsApp, Google Maps, Facebook and Instagram take you to those services, which have their own privacy policies.

We keep your information for as long as you book with us and as long as we need it for the reasons above. Booking and payment records are kept for at least five years, as South African tax law requires. After that, we delete it or make it anonymous. Visit details are kept for 13 months, and IP addresses for 30 days.

Your information is sent over secure, encrypted connections and stored on systems only our team and our service providers can reach. My bookings uses one-time sign-in codes instead of passwords.

Under the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA), you can ask what information we hold about you, ask us to correct or delete it, and object to how we use it. You can update your details and your dogs on My bookings, or email us at info@tailhaus.co.za.

If you're not happy with how we've handled your information, please tell us first. You can also complain to the Information Regulator at inforegulator.org.za or POPIAComplaints@inforegulator.org.za.

If we change this policy, we'll update it here and change the date at the top.