Your hotel needs to make use of personal data every day.

Usually this data belongs to either your employees or your customers.

When it comes to making effective, practical - and above all safe - use of that information, you need access to some privacy expertise.

Otherwise you run the risks of using personal data in ways which might not be legal, they might make the data vulnerable to loss or attack and could result in individuals simply being less willing to trust you with their information.

And when people don't trust you with their information it becomes so much harder to recruit them - either as customers or employees - and maintain a valuable relationship with them.

This is a bigger problem than most hotel owners and managers imagine. You are good at running your hotel, yet sometimes you need specialist advice and know-how to look after the personal data your hotel relies upon if it is to thrive.

You see, the privacy information on your website can give you away. It reveals your underlying attitude to customer and employee information and suggests you may have problems - which in reality might not be quite what you think it is. Which may in turn cause your customers and employees some difficulty in the future.

You don't want that sort of reputation do you?

Of course not. Which is why you need some privacy expertise. Especially if you're going to make use of "personalisation" of your guest experience and direct marketing using zero party and first party data to attract customers to book direct and keep coming back.

Data protection and privacy management can support your marketing objectives when it's done properly. The sad truth is many hotels are leaving themselves vulnerable and wasting their opportunity to play a bigger part in the modern data economy.

Here is an introduction to how we can help you with a step by step approach approach.

With the Discovery programme our team will analyse the data protection and privacy management aspects of your business for two days.

They will ask you - and key members in your team - a lot of questions.

They will ask you for information about the data protection and privacy management investment and effort you have already made and they will look at what you do from the perspective of a customer and an employee to understand how you might look to them. This is all carried out on a remote basis to keep ciosts down.

They will come back to you a week later with a report of recommendations to improve your data protection and privacy management.

This report and the set of recommendations will be valuable to you regardless of who you then decide to do business with.

That value is assured because our report to you has objectivity. We know about your particular situation because we take the time to find out.

We guarantee that after our Discovery contract work we are going to quote you a price.

We will quote you for the systems, methods, technology, training and subsequent ongoing membership proposals (more on why membership is valuable to you below).

At this point you are free to choose anyone else to carry out the work. You can use the Discovery report of recommendations as the specification.

Of course, we would like you to work with us so the fee for the Discovery contract will count as a credit towards your purchase of the Transformation package if you choose to have us carry out the work with you.

We guarantee that if we come in and carry out the recommendations in this discovery contract, if it's not done when we said it would be done or it's not done in the way we said it would be, there is a penalty on us:

We will rebate 25% of the cost of the implementation back to you.

We give you a guarantee that this will be on time and on budget.

Or you get money back.

Data protection and privacy is complicated. You want to know that you are making the right decision when you choose to work with hotelDPO - that's why we offer you this guarantee.

Alternatively if you want an onsite appraisal of your requirements you can ask us for a Discovery Plus contract.

We agree on the fee for our team to visit your premises and carry out a two day analysis. With a report of recommendations being delivered to you one week later.

The same terms apply for Discovery Plus as noted for the Discovery contract in the paragraph above. The same standard of report, the same guarantee, the same credit against the purchase of the transformation package described in the recommendations.

To arrange your discovery quote you can start the conversation by booking a free 20 minute call with us.

Ongoing training is a critical part of your ability to deploy data protection and privacy skills. It's how you get privacy expertise inside your business.

If you ever have a reportable data breach one of the questions the regulator is likely to ask you is, "when did the employees involved last receive data protection and privacy training?"

Yet there is more to this than just trying to stay on the right side of the regulator. You want to be doing the right thing for your customers and other data subjects. You want to be putting people first.

And you do that by making sure your team are properly trained. Essential data protection and privacy awareness for most of them, more advanced, specialist privacy and data protection skills for key employees.

All carried out in a way which makes the training accessible and easy to understand. With proper training records so you can demonstrate your accountability.