Privacy policy

Who we are

Martins Farm Estate, Martins Farm, Frant, East Sussex TN3 9HG, operating under HINE Estate, is the controller of the personal data described here. For anything on this page, write to hello@martinsfarmestate.com and one of us replies.

What we collect, and why

We only collect what a request needs in order to be answered.

• Enquiries and reservation requests: your name, email address, any phone number you give us, your dates, guest and dog numbers, and the message itself. We use these to answer you and to hold a stay. The lawful basis is the steps taken at your request before entering a contract, and our legitimate interest in replying to correspondence.
• Newsletter and interest lists: your name and email address, kept only while you remain subscribed. The lawful basis is your consent, which you may withdraw at any time by replying to any message we send.
• Language preference: the site remembers the language you chose, so that our replies and pages match it.
• Analytics and marketing measurement: only where you have accepted the relevant cookies. Before that, no analytics or marketing tags run at all.

Cookies and consent

Strictly necessary cookies keep the site working — your language choice, your consent decision, and the state of a booking in progress. Everything else, including analytics and any marketing measurement, is loaded only after you accept it in the cookie banner.

Our measurement category covers Google Analytics, Microsoft Clarity and Metricool. Google Analytics tells us which pages are read, where guests arrive from and which non-identifying planning steps are reached, such as starting an enquiry or newsletter form and handing off to Lodgify. Those Analytics events send no form contents, names, email addresses, phone numbers, booking references or selected dates. A pending offline Google Ads row is prepared only after a successfully stored enquiry and only when Marketing & campaign attribution is also on; its later upload states “Ad User Data: Granted” and “Ad Personalization: Denied”. Microsoft Clarity gives us session-use insight — heatmaps and recordings of how pages are scrolled and clicked — so we can see where the site is confusing. These website analytics are not used for advertising, and Microsoft Clarity is told not to store advertising data even if you have accepted the advertising category. All three load only after you accept measurement, and we do not deliberately send Clarity what you type into a form.

You can change or withdraw your choice at any time using the “Cookie settings” link in the footer of every page. Withdrawing measurement consent first tells Google Analytics that consent is denied, then reloads the page so the Google runtime and its automatic listeners are removed; it also tells Microsoft Clarity to stop storing anything and clears its cookies from your browser. Metricool page-view calls stop when measurement consent is withdrawn.

After you accept measurement, Metricool helps us count visits to eligible public pages and understand referring websites. Its tracker receives the page address, browser viewport dimensions and an origin-only referrer where available, alongside the network information required to receive the request. We do not pass it form contents, guest details or booking information. Pages with query strings, fragments, private or unrecognised paths, and visits with detailed referrers are excluded. This means Metricool will not count every visit or every page.

Campaign attribution

Only after you turn on Marketing & campaign attribution in Cookie settings, this site may keep a small, allowlisted set of campaign details from the link you followed — for example, UTM campaign values or a Google click identifier. They are stored first-party in this browser and attached only if you choose to submit an enquiry, so we can understand which campaign led to it. If you leave that choice off, the details are not retained.

A pending offline Google Ads conversion row is created only after the enquiry has been successfully stored and only when both Measurement and Marketing & campaign attribution are on. A later upload contains only the GCLID, the conversion name and time, an order ID that contains no form data or direct identifier and is used only to prevent duplicates, and the consent fields “Ad User Data: Granted” and “Ad Personalization: Denied”.

We upload no name, email address, phone number, message, selected dates, monetary value or other form content. No Google Ads tag is loaded in your browser, no Google Ads cookie is set or read there, and no Google Ads request is sent from your browser. An authorised operator previews and applies a manual upload, or the row is sent through Google Ads Data Manager.

Meta advertising measurement

Meta Pixel and Meta Conversions API are disabled by default. Accepting Marketing & campaign attribution does not activate them by itself: they run only if we separately enable the service and you have already granted that choice. If both conditions are met, approved events can measure page views, availability searches, date selection, booking hand-offs and requests, general enquiries, newsletter sign-ups, voucher interest and consent-linked confirmed bookings. Events from before consent are dropped and are not replayed.

Meta may receive an approved, simplified, query-free page or event-source URL, event name and time, an event ID used to deduplicate browser and server copies, and allowlisted context such as page location, property, arrival month, guest or night counts and, only for a confirmed booking, value and currency. On a browser Pixel request, Meta receives the IP address and browser user-agent; for events with a designated server copy, the Conversions API sends those details again. After consent, Pixel may set or read the Meta cookies _fbp and _fbc; designated server copies may include their existing identifiers. The site applies the strict-origin referrer policy. Pixel is allowed only when its automatically determined page URL is an approved, simplified Martins Farm URL without query parameters and the request referrer is empty or limited to an origin. If either check fails, Pixel is blocked and no browser event is sent. We do not send names, email addresses, phone numbers, messages, booking references or free-text form contents. The site code supplies no Advanced Matching fields; activation is blocked unless Automatic Advanced Matching is also verified off in Meta Events Manager.

You can withdraw this choice at any time through Cookie settings in the footer. New Pixel and Conversions API forwarding then stops immediately, the Pixel is told that consent is revoked, our consent-evidence cookie is removed, and this site attempts to clear _fbp and _fbc where the browser allows. Meta handles data it receives under its own privacy policy at facebook.com/privacy/policy.

Who processes data on our behalf

We keep the list of third parties deliberately short, and we do not sell personal data to anyone.

• Our booking provider, which runs the availability calendar and secure checkout on the reservation page and holds your booking details.
• Our hosting and database provider, which stores enquiry and reservation records for us.
• Our email provider, which delivers confirmations, replies and any newsletter you asked for.
• Our reviews provider, which displays verified guest reviews collected from booking partners. Reviews shown on this site are published by the guests who left them, not by us.
• The managed AI service provided by our site platform, which processes an Ask Winston question in order to produce the answer.
• Our measurement providers, Google Analytics, Google Ads, Microsoft Clarity and Metricool, only with your consent, as described above.

Live opening information from Google Maps Platform

When you ask Ask Winston whether a nearby venue we already name on this site is open, our server looks that venue's published opening hours up through Google Maps Platform (the Places API) and shows you what came back. Your question, your conversation, your session token and your network address do not go to Google: the only thing sent is an identifier for the venue itself, which we hold in our own settings.

What comes back from Google is shown to you and then discarded. We do not cache it, store it in our database, write it into our records of the conversation, send it to our analytics, or keep it in your browser. Reload the page and it is gone. The venue identifier is the only Google-supplied value this site keeps.

Use of that feature is subject to Google's own terms. The Google Terms of Service are at policies.google.com/terms and the Google Privacy Policy, which explains how Google handles data, is at policies.google.com/privacy.

Ask Winston

Ask Winston answers questions about the estate, and will also help with ordinary general questions. When you ask something, your question — and the few most recent turns of that conversation, so the answer makes sense — is sent securely to our own server, which passes it to the managed AI service our site platform provides in order to compose a reply. Anything presented as a fact about Martins Farm comes only from content we have published.

We keep a record of the questions asked and the answers given, so we can see what guests want to know and improve what we publish. That record holds the question, the answer, the page and language it was asked from, and a one-way fingerprint of a random per-tab token — never your IP address, and never a cookie or advertising profile. Email addresses and telephone numbers typed into a question are removed before the record is stored. If you send us an enquiry in the same visit, we link those questions to your enquiry so we can answer you properly. We keep this record on our own systems only. The conversation itself is held in your browser for the visit and disappears when you close the tab, or immediately if you use “Clear chat” — but that clears only your own copy: the estate record of the question and answer remains on our systems. Write to us if you would like it removed.

Please do not put personal details into Ask Winston. If you need to tell us something about yourself or your booking, use the contact form or write to hello@martinsfarmestate.com.

Embedded content from other sites

Some pages show content hosted elsewhere — the booking calendar, the reviews panel and social embeds. Those providers can see that your browser requested their content and may set their own cookies under their own policies. Where an embed is not ours, the page says so.

How long we keep things

Enquiry and reservation records are kept while they are useful for answering you, honouring a stay and meeting the accounting and tax obligations that apply to a booking. Newsletter details are kept until you unsubscribe. We do not publish a fixed retention schedule here because we would rather not state a period we have not genuinely configured; if you want your records removed sooner, ask us and we will do it.

Questions asked of Ask Winston, and his replies, are kept as an estate record so we can see what guests want to know; contact details found in the text are removed before the record is written. If you send an enquiry or booking request in the same visit, those questions are joined to that record. We keep them while they are useful for improving what the site answers, and we delete them with the rest of your records when you ask us to erase you.

Your rights

Under UK data protection law you may ask for a copy of the personal data we hold about you, ask us to correct or erase it, object to or restrict how we use it, ask for it in a portable form, and withdraw any consent you gave. Write to hello@martinsfarmestate.com and we will answer. If you are not satisfied with our answer, you may complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.

Changes to this notice

If our data flows change — a new provider, a new form — we will update this page rather than quietly leave it out of date.