Privacy Policy

1. Scope

This policy describes how staevi Technologies (Pty) Ltd handles personal information in accordance with the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 (POPIA).

2. What we collect

• Guests: name (if provided at check-in), stay details (room, dates), booking details, and messages sent through the portal. Your portal session is tied to the stay, not to you, and expires at check-out.
• Guest contact details: if you give a guesthouse your email address or phone number — at check-in, or when you book a room — that guesthouse keeps it after your stay ends, so it can contact you about staying again. This is the one thing that outlives your stay, and section 6 explains what it is used for and how to stop it.
• Restaurants, guesthouses and other businesses: business name, contact details, how you would like to be paid (a payment link or QR code), the menu and other content you publish, and a record of your staevi subscription payments.
• Diners: opening a restaurant's menu on staevi asks for nothing and records nothing about you.
• Visits to staevi's own pages (this site and the dashboards) are counted using a random number kept in your browser, so a return visit is not counted twice. No name, no IP address, and a browser set to “Do Not Track” is not counted.
• Payments: staevi subscriptions are processed by PayFast; some guest payments by Paystack. staevi never receives or stores card numbers.

3. How we use it

To operate the guest portal, facilitate and pay out bookings, provide support, and improve the service. We do not sell personal information.

4. Sharing

Booking details are shared between the guest, the partner delivering the experience, and the referring property — only as needed to fulfil the booking. Payment data is handled by PayFast or Paystack under their own policies.

Your contact details are not shared between guesthouses. A guesthouse you have stayed at can email you; another one on staevi cannot, and cannot see that you exist. staevi does not build a cross-property guest list and does not sell or rent contact details to anyone.

5. Retention

POPIA (section 14) says personal information may be kept only as long as it is needed, unless a law requires it to be kept longer. In practice:

• A guest's access to the portal ends at check-out.
• Stay records (room, dates, tab, messages) are kept as the guesthouse's record of the stay, for bookings, disputes and its own accounts.
• The guest register — residential address, residence status and signature — is cleared automatically two years after the stay.
• Payment records are kept for five years, because the Tax Administration Act (section 29) requires tax records to be kept that long.
• A business that stops paying or cancels keeps its account and menu, hidden from the public, so it can come back without starting again. Ask us at hello@staevi.com and we delete it, apart from the payment records above.

Contact details kept for the purpose in section 6 are held by that guesthouse until you unsubscribe or ask for them to be deleted. If you unsubscribe we keep a record that you did, and nothing more of the marketing relationship — that record is what stops you being added back by a later booking.

6. Emails about staying again

A guesthouse you have stayed at may email you to invite you back — for example an offer on a quiet week. Under section 69 of POPIA this is permitted to an existing customer, about similar goods and services, provided you can opt out. Some things we hold ourselves to beyond that:

• Only where you have actually stayed. Never a guesthouse you have not been a guest of.
• Every email carries a one-click unsubscribe. No account, no password, no reply needed — one tap and it is done.
• Unsubscribing is per guesthouse. Leaving one list does not affect any other, and the page says whose list you have left.
• It is checked at the moment of sending, not when the email was written, so an opt-out always wins.
• The guesthouse never sees your address as a list. staevi shows them how many people they can reach, not who those people are.
• Never marketing for third parties. Only the guesthouse you stayed at, about staying there again.

Booking confirmations, messages from your host and check-out receipts are not marketing and are not affected by unsubscribing.

7. Your rights

Under POPIA you may request access to, correction of, or deletion of your personal information by writing to hello@staevi.com. You may also lodge a complaint with the Information Regulator of South Africa.

8. Security

We use reputable infrastructure providers, encrypt data in transit, and restrict access to personal information to what the service requires.

9. Contact

Information Officer, staevi Technologies (Pty) Ltd (Reg 2026/593871/07) — hello@staevi.com, 068 601 3509, Jeffreys Bay, Eastern Cape, South Africa.