Privacy

The Living Collective lets furnished homes and apartments in Hilton, Pietermaritzburg and Sheffield Beach. Under POPIA we are the responsible party for your personal information, which means we decide how it is used and we answer for it.

Our Information Officer is Wendy Nwankwo, who you can reach at info@thelivingcollective.co.za or on 033 814 9950.

When you send a request to book or a lease enquiry, we receive the home you chose, your dates or move in date, the lease length, the number of guests, your name, email address and phone number, and any message you add.

If you phone, WhatsApp or email us, we keep what you share in that conversation. Once a booking is confirmed we may ask for further details the stay needs, and we will tell you why when we ask. No payment is taken on this website, so your card details never pass through it.

Your information lets us reply to your request, confirm dates and prices, prepare for your arrival and stay in touch during your stay. We also keep the records the law asks of us, such as financial records for tax.

We send marketing only to people who have asked for it, and you can stop it at any time.

Your request goes to the team who handle our bookings. To run the website we use a small number of service providers: Vercel hosts the website, Supabase keeps booking requests in a secure database, and Resend delivers the emails that confirm your request. Our email is hosted in South Africa by Xneelo.

These providers handle your information on our instructions and keep it secure. Nobody else receives it unless the law requires us to share it.

Some of these providers store or process information outside South Africa. Our booking database is in Ireland, where the European Union’s data protection law applies, and the website and email services run on servers in the European Union and the United States.

POPIA allows this when your information stays protected to a standard similar to our own law, or when the transfer is needed to arrange your stay. We choose providers that meet that standard.

We keep your information for as long as we need it to deal with your request and your stay. Financial records for a stay are kept for five years, as South African tax law requires. After that we delete your information or remove anything that identifies you.

The website uses an encrypted connection, and booking requests can be read only by our team after signing in. Our service providers protect the information they hold for us.

Should your information ever reach someone who should not have it, we will tell you and the Information Regulator, as POPIA requires.

This website sets no cookies for visitors and uses no analytics, advertising or tracking tools. The sign in our team uses for the admin area has a cookie that applies to that area only.

Like most websites, our hosting provider keeps short technical logs, such as IP addresses and the pages requested, to keep the site running and secure.

Links to Google Maps, Instagram and Facebook take you to those services, where their own privacy policies apply.

You may ask us what personal information we hold about you, ask us to correct or delete it, or object to how we use it. Email info@thelivingcollective.co.za and we will reply within 30 days.

If you are unhappy with how we handled your information, please tell us first so we can put it right. You may also complain to the Information Regulator of South Africa at inforegulator.org.za.

Bookings must be made by an adult aged 18 or over. Children are welcome to stay with their families, and the only detail we hold about them is how many are coming.

We will update this page if the way we handle information changes. The date above shows when it last changed.