How long is booking data kept — and what do customers agree to?

Set the auto-delete period for booking data, and manage the cancellation, terms and privacy policies customers agree to when booking.

Two settings pages cover this: Settings → Data retention controls how long booking data is kept, and Settings → Customer policies holds the cancellation, terms and privacy policies customers agree to when they book.

Only Owners and Admins see these pages. Other staff who reach them by link can view but not change anything.

Data retention

• Go to Settings → Data retention.
• Pick a Data retention period — 6, 12, 18, 24 or 36 months (the default is 24 months). Booking data older than this is automatically deleted, which helps you stay GDPR-compliant. The one exception is bookings that carry a payment (a deposit, full prepayment, event ticket, paid extras, a paid pre-order, a charged no-show fee or a gift-card payment): the customer's personal details are removed just the same, but the anonymised payment facts are kept for your financial records for as long as your account is open.
• Click Save changes. The retention period feeds your customer privacy notice automatically — when you change it, the notice customers see updates itself, and the save confirms with "Saved — this also updated your customer privacy notice."

If you run a loyalty scheme, the same page has a Deletion reminders (loyalty members) section: loyalty members are emailed before their details are deleted — a visit resets their clock — and you choose 2 or 3 reminders and how many days before deletion each goes out (between 1 and 180 days each, furthest out first — the defaults are 60 then 14 days, and deletion only happens at least 7 days after the final reminder). Any loyalty activity — a visit, an earn, a redemption — restarts the member's retention clock, and the reminder email's wording is editable in Settings → Email templates ("Data-deletion warning (loyalty members)").

Customer policies

Settings → Customer policies has three cards — Cancellation & no-show, Terms & conditions and Privacy. They're ready to use out of the box; you only add wording if you want to.

• Each policy is built from three layers: a reviewed legal baseline you can read but not edit (click View the wording that's always included); clauses Added automatically from your settings — shown as chips like "Deposit refund: full refund up to 24h before" or "Data kept: 24 months", each with a Change link to the page that controls it; and your own optional free text.
• To add house rules, type in Add your own wording (optional) — up to 5,000 characters per policy. If the box is empty, Insert reviewed wording drops in a professional starting point to tailor.
• Click Preview what customers see to read the full assembled policy exactly as a customer will.
• Click Save changes. Cards show a Customised badge once you've added your own wording, or Baseline otherwise.

What customers agree to

Every booking, table order, event ticket and gift card purchase freezes a snapshot of the exact policy at the time — past ones keep what the customer agreed to; edits only apply to future ones. The agreement mechanism matches the surface: online bookings show "By booking you agree to the cancellation policy and terms" (completing the booking is the agreement, with no tick-box); phone or in-person bookings record a staff "customer agreed (verbal/in-person)" tick; table orders show "By paying you agree to … Order Terms." with a required allergy acknowledgement tick (plus an 18-or-over tick when the order contains alcohol); event tickets and gift cards agree at their own checkouts. Settings → Customer policies → Terms by purchase type shows each mechanism and the exact terms per purchase type.

Because the deposit, no-show fee and cancellation-deadline settings write themselves into these policies, changing those settings also updates the policy text — the pages involved show a "This also appears in your customer cancellation policy" note.

Related: When do customers get their deposit back? · How do I handle a customer's data request? · How do I bulk-delete data (tables, bookings, customers…)?