Privacy Policy

Who we are

Berinag Home Stay, Chaukori Road, Village Ganai, Berinag, Pithoragarh District, Uttarakhand 262531, India. We are a registered homestay under the Uttarakhand Tourism Development Board homestay scheme.

The person responsible for anything on this page is Deepak Pant. You can reach him at stay@berinaghomestay.com or on WhatsApp.

What we collect

Only what you give us, which is normally:

• Your name, because we have to write it in the guest register.
• Your phone number and email, so that we can reply and send directions.
• Your dates and party size, so that we know whether we have room.
• Anything you choose to tell us in the notes box — a diet, a knee, a birthday. This is optional and we would rather have it than not.
• Government photo identification on arrival, because Indian law requires accommodation providers to record it. We write the number in a paper register. We do not photocopy or photograph it, and we do not retain a digital copy.

We do not collect payment card details, because we do not accept cards. Advance payments arrive by UPI or bank transfer, which means the transaction detail sits with your bank and ours, not with us.

Why we hold it

Three reasons, and no others:

• To answer you. This is the main one.
• To host you properly. Knowing about a diet or a mobility need in advance is the difference between a good stay and an awkward one.
• Because the law says so. The guest register with identification details is a legal requirement in India and we cannot opt out of it.

We have never used your details to advertise anything to you, and there is no marketing list you are added to automatically. The seasonal letter is opt-in only and you have to ask us to add you.

How long we keep it

Enquiries that do not become bookings are deleted from the inbox after about twelve months, when Deepak does the annual clear-out.

Booking correspondence is kept for three years, because that is roughly how long it takes for somebody to write and say 'we stayed with you in 2023, do you remember'. We usually do.

The paper guest register is kept for as long as the law requires and then stored in a locked cupboard in the house. It is not digitised.

Who else sees it

Almost nobody.

• Our drivers get your name, arrival point and phone number, and only if you have asked for a pickup.
• The authorities get the guest register if they ask for it, which they are entitled to do.
• Nobody else. We do not sell, rent, trade or share your details with any third party for any commercial purpose. We have never done this and would not know how to start.

If you booked through a travel platform rather than directly, that platform has its own policy which we do not control, and you should read theirs as well as ours.

The website

This site is deliberately simple. It does not set any cookie of its own, and there is no analytics script, no advertising pixel, no heat-mapping tool and no chat widget.

Three things are loaded from outside servers, and those servers will see your IP address as a technical consequence of delivering the file:

• Google Fonts — the typefaces.
• jsDelivr and unpkg — the Bootstrap, Swiper and animation libraries.
• Unsplash — some photographs, where our own are not yet in place.
• Google Maps — only on the pages with an embedded map, and only when that map loads.

If you would rather none of that happened, a content blocker will stop all of it and the site will still work, though it will look plainer.

Your rights

Under India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, and under the GDPR if you are writing to us from Europe, you can ask us to:

• tell you what we hold about you;
• correct anything wrong;
• delete everything we are not legally obliged to keep;
• stop sending you the seasonal letter, which you can also do by replying to it with the word stop.

There is no form for this. Send a message and Deepak will do it, usually the same evening. We will not ask you why.

Children

We do not knowingly collect information about children directly. Where a child is part of a booking, we hold only what the accompanying adult tells us — usually a first name and an age, so that Kamla knows to cook something milder.

Security

An honest description rather than a reassuring one: your details sit in an email account with two-factor authentication enabled, in a WhatsApp conversation on a phone with a passcode, and in a paper ledger in a locked cupboard. There is no database, no CRM and no cloud storage.

This is a small operation and the protection is proportionate to it. If that is not enough for you, telephone us instead and we will write nothing down beyond the register entry.

Changes to this page

If we change anything material we will change the date at the top and, for anything significant, mention it in the next seasonal letter. This version was last reviewed on 1 July 2026.

If any of it is unclear, ask before you book rather than after. We will explain it in plain words, because plain words are what this page was written in.