Privacy

I'm Brenda, a licensed private hire driver, licensed by South Gloucestershire Council.

Brenda's Airport Transfers is a trading name of BK Company, a partnership registered in England, trading from 11 Bevington Close, Midsomer Norton, Radstock BA3 2FD. BK Company is the data controller - the business legally answerable for your information. I write “I” below because I am the only person who reads any of it.

If you want to ask about anything on this page, email contact@brendasairporttransfers.co.uk or use the contact form. A real person answers both - there is only me.

BK Company is registered with the Information Commissioner's Office as a fee payer, registration number ZC223242.

When you ask what a journey costs: nothing about you. A postcode, a date and a time, and which way you are going. That is all it takes to work out a price, so that is all I ask for - I do not know who you are at that point and I do not need to. Nothing is written down unless you go on to book.

When you book: your name, email address, phone number, the address a car has to find, how many people, how much luggage, your flight number if you gave one, and anything you typed in the notes box.

The full address is asked for at that point and not before, because that is when a car actually has to find your door - asking a stranger where they live before telling them what something costs is a thing I would rather not do.

If you make an account: your email address, and a reference number from Stripe if you save a card. I never see or hold your card details. Whatever you sign in with is kept in the form that lets you in and nothing more - your password is stored scrambled (hashed) so nobody, including me, can read it back. When you set a password, the first five characters of its scrambled form are checked against Have I Been Pwned's list of leaked passwords - not the password itself, and nothing that identifies you.

If you fill in your details: the name, phone number and pickup address you put there, so you are not typing them again at every booking. That address is yours to change or clear at any time on the same screen, and unlike a journey it stays until you do - which is the point of it.

The lawful basis for nearly all of it is performance of a contract - or the steps you asked me to take before entering one. Put plainly: I'm holding this because you asked for a journey, and I cannot do the journey without it.

The one exception is the money. Once a journey is paid for, keeping a record of the amount, the date and the payment reference is a legal obligation rather than part of our agreement - HMRC requires it of every business, and it is why those few facts outlive everything else about you. More on that below.

The price is worked out by the website, not by me. Your postcode decides which of my areas you are in, and the date and time decide what the clock and the calendar add. The same machinery decides when I am already booked and cannot take you. Nothing about you as a person goes into it - no profiling, no history, no guessing what you might pay - and if you think it has got your area wrong, ring me and I will price it myself.

There is no analytics, no advertising pixel, no tracking cookie and no cookie banner, because there is nothing to consent to. The only cookie set is the one that keeps you signed in, and only if you sign in: it lasts thirty days, and signing out removes it.

A few things are kept for my sake rather than yours, and the law asks me to say which and why. Your IP address is noted for about an hour whenever you ask a price, book, or ask for a sign-in link, so that one person - or one program - cannot hammer the site; that is a legitimate interest in keeping it working, and the address is not used for anything else and not joined to your booking. And if somebody cancels at the last minute again and again, or does not pay, I can put their email address or phone number on a short list of people I will not take online bookings from, with a note to myself of why. That is a legitimate interest in protecting a one-car business from the same person a fourth time; they can still ring me, and they can ask me what the note says.

And if you arrive from an advert, the link carries the advert’s name - something like an advert in ChatGPT - and that name is written on your booking, so I can tell whether advertising is worth what it costs. It is a note on one booking, not a record of you: nothing is stored on your device, nothing follows you from one visit to the next, and if you come back another day it is not there at all.

One email that is not about a booking. A day after a journey I send a single email asking whether you would leave a word on Google. Nothing else - no offers, no newsletter, and never more than once per journey. There is a box on the booking form to say you would rather I did not, and a one-press link in the email itself that stops them for good; if you use either, that address is kept on a short do-not-ask list so a later booking does not start it again. Confirmations, receipts and anything about a booking itself are not affected - those you need.

If you use the phone app: the same information as the website, plus a push token - the address Apple or Google give your phone so a notification can reach it - and which of the two it is. It is used only to tell you about your own bookings: booked, moved, cancelled. The key that keeps you signed in lives in your phone's secure storage and is removed when you sign out. You can close your account from inside the app, and it does exactly what closing it on the website does - see below.

If you tell me about a disability. The notes box is where people mention a folding wheelchair, an assistance dog, or that somebody needs a hand getting into the car — because my terms promise those are never a reason to refuse you, and they are not. That is health information, and the law treats it more carefully than the rest of this page.

So, plainly: you do not have to tell me. If you do, you are giving me permission to hold it for the one purpose of driving you properly — that is the legal basis, and it is called explicit consent. It reaches me and no one else: it is not in any notification, it is not sent to any of the service providers below, and it is deleted with the booking at 12 months like everything else. You can ask me to remove it sooner and I will.

Nobody reads your details but me. Nothing here is sold, nothing is rented, and nothing is used to advertise anything to you - ever.

To run the site, a few service providers each do one job on my behalf: hosting the website and the database (in London), sending the emails, taking card payments, delivering the app's notifications, telling me when something breaks, and suggesting addresses as you type. Each is bound to its one job and may not use your information for anything of its own. Some of them are based outside the UK; where they are, the safeguards UK data protection law requires apply. I never see a card number.

And by law. My licence requires me to keep a record of every booking and to show it to South Gloucestershire Council or the police if they ask; the money side goes to HMRC and my accountant. Nobody else - there is no other circumstance in which your booking leaves my hands.

12 months after the journey happens, your name, your number and both addresses are stripped off the record and cannot be recovered.

That period is deliberately short. A record of your journeys is also a record of the nights your house was empty, and it stops being useful to anyone the moment the fare is settled. A year is long enough to sort out a dispute or a repeat booking and no longer - and it is also exactly what my licence demands: a private hire operator must keep the record of each booking for at least twelve months from the last thing written on it, so for that year I am holding it because the law says so, not only because you asked for a car. If anything is added to a booking after the journey - a receipt, a note - the twelve months run from that instead.

What survives is the money: an amount, a date and a payment reference, kept for at least six years because HMRC requires it of any business - the exact rule is five years from the January the tax return was due, so up to about seven. Those are records of a transaction, not of where you live.

Two small lists live longer, because their whole point is to be remembered at the next booking.

The do-not-ask list for the review email holds an email address and nothing else, and it has to outlive everything else on this page - it is the record of you telling me not to write to you, so deleting it would be how I forget and ask again.

The list of people I will not take online bookings fromholds a phone number or an email address, and a short line of mine about why. Nothing about any journey. If nothing on that list turns anybody away for 6 years, the entry is deleted automatically; if somebody on it tries to book, the clock starts again from that day. Either list comes off the moment you ask, unless I have a good reason to keep it and I will tell you what it is.

This is done by a job that runs on a schedule, not by me remembering to do it. If you make an account, it stays until you close it - on the website or from inside the app - and closing it removes your details and your saved card at once, while the journeys follow the schedule above and the money follows HMRC.

Under UK GDPR you can ask me to:

• show you everything I hold about you;
• correct anything that is wrong;
• delete it;
• give you a copy in a form you can take somewhere else;
• stop using it while a disagreement is sorted out, without deleting it - useful if you think something is wrong and want it frozen until we have worked out what;
• stop holding it at all, which you can object to at any time.

Email or ring, and it is done within a month - usually the same week, because there is not much of it. There is no charge, and I will not ask you why.

If you think I have got something wrong with your information, complain to me first - email or ring, and say it is a complaint. I will acknowledge it within thirty days, in practice the same week, and answer it properly and in writing.

If you are not happy with my answer, or would rather go straight there, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113.

The link to your journey is the only key to it - whether you got it on the screen after booking or in an email. Anyone who has the link can see the journey on it, so treat it the way you would treat a booking reference; it is a different link from the one that signs you in.

The booking terms are on the terms page, including where I do and do not collect from.