Privacy Policy
Please read: this page is a draft that is still being reviewed and has not yet been checked by a lawyer. If anything here is unclear, or matters to your booking, please confirm it with our reception on +91 354 225 2242 or [email protected] before you book, and we will confirm it to you in writing.
This policy explains what personal information Hotel Apsara collects from you, why we collect it, who we share it with, how long we keep it, and what you can ask us to do about it. It covers this website, apsarahotel.com, and the running of the hotel itself at Hotel Apsara, Apsara Building, 6 Laden La Road, Chauk Bazaar, Darjeeling – 734101, West Bengal, India.
1. The short version
We collect what we need in order to hold your room, to check you in lawfully, to take payment and to answer you. We do not sell your information to anybody, we do not store your card number, and we do not send marketing that you have not asked for.
2. What we collect
| When you make a booking | Your name, and the names of the other guests; postal address; telephone number; email address; arrival and departure dates; room and rate chosen; number and ages of guests; and anything you tell us about how you would like to be looked after, such as a floor preference or a dietary requirement. |
|---|---|
| When you pay | The fact, amount, date and status of the payment, and a transaction reference. Card numbers, CVV codes, net-banking credentials and UPI PINs are entered on our payment gateway partner's own secure page. We never receive or store them. |
| When you arrive | Details from the photo identity document you present — passport, Aadhaar, driving licence or other government identity document — together with your signature in the guest register. For foreign nationals, passport, visa and immigration details as required by law. |
| When you write to us | The content of your email, message or enquiry form, and the contact details you send it from, so that we can reply and keep a record. |
| When you use this website | Your browser's IP address and standard technical request data, held in ordinary server logs, and the cookies described in section 6. |
| While you are on the premises | Images from closed-circuit television in the public areas of the hotel, operated for the safety of guests, staff and property. CCTV is not installed in guest rooms or in bathrooms. |
We do not ask you for information about your health, religion, caste or political views. If you choose to tell us something of that kind — a medical condition, or a dietary requirement with a religious basis — we use it only to look after you during your stay.
3. Why we use it, and on what basis
- To perform our contract with you — to hold and confirm the reservation, allocate a room, provide the services you booked, take payment and issue an invoice.
- To comply with the law — to maintain the guest register that hotels in India are required to keep, to report the arrival of foreign nationals to the authorities in the prescribed form, to meet tax and accounting obligations, and to respond to a lawful demand from a police or government authority.
- For our legitimate interests — to keep the premises secure, to prevent and investigate fraud or damage, to answer enquiries and complaints, and to keep proper business records.
- With your consent — where you have specifically asked to receive offers or a newsletter from us. You can withdraw that consent at any time, and every message we send you will tell you how.
4. Payment information
Online payments are handled end to end by a payment gateway that is certified to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. Your card and banking credentials are submitted directly to that gateway. What comes back to us is a confirmation, an amount and a reference — nothing that could be used to make a payment. The gateway we use processes your payment under its own privacy policy as well as this one; the current gateway is named on our checkout page. If you pay at the hotel by card, the terminal is operated by our acquiring bank on the same basis.
5. Who we share it with
We share your information only where we have to, and only with:
- our payment gateway and our bank, so that a payment or a refund can be processed;
- the travel agent or online booking platform through which you booked, where you booked that way, so that the reservation and any change to it can be matched up;
- police, immigration, tax and other government authorities, where the law requires it — which, for the guest register and for foreign-national reporting, it does;
- service providers who work for us under contract — for example the company that hosts this website or maintains our systems — who may handle your data only on our instructions;
- our professional advisers, where necessary to establish or defend a legal claim.
We do not sell, rent or trade your personal information, and we do not pass it to advertisers.
6. Cookies
This website is built on WordPress and uses a small number of cookies. At the date of this policy they fall into two groups:
- Strictly necessary cookies set by the website software and its shopping-cart component, which remember the contents of a booking in progress and keep a logged-in session secure. The site does not work properly without them.
- Security cookies set by the content delivery and security service that sits in front of this website, which help it distinguish a genuine visitor from automated traffic.
At the date shown at the foot of this page this website runs no advertising cookies and no third-party analytics or tracking cookies. If that changes, we will update this section and, where the law requires it, ask for your consent first. You can block or delete cookies in your browser settings; parts of the booking process may then stop working.
7. How long we keep it
Booking, invoicing and guest-register records are kept for as long as the law requires them to be kept and for as long as we may need them to answer a query or defend a claim, and are then deleted or destroyed. CCTV recordings are overwritten on a short cycle in the ordinary course.
8. Keeping it safe
Access to guest records is limited to the staff who need it to do their work. Paper records are kept at reception and in the hotel office. This website is served over an encrypted (HTTPS) connection. No system can be guaranteed absolutely secure, but if a breach ever occurred that was likely to affect you, we would tell you and the appropriate authority.
9. Your rights
You may ask us to:
- tell you what personal information about you we hold, and give you a copy of it;
- correct anything that is wrong or out of date;
- delete information we no longer have a lawful reason to keep — bearing in mind that we cannot delete a statutory guest-register entry or an accounting record before its retention period has run;
- stop sending you marketing, which we will do immediately;
- withdraw a consent you gave us, without affecting anything done before you withdrew it.
Write to [email protected], or to the postal address below. We may need to verify your identity before we act, so that we do not disclose your information to someone else. We will respond within a reasonable time and in any event within the period the law allows. If you are not satisfied with our response you are entitled to complain to the appropriate data protection authority in India.
Privacy questions, requests and grievances are handled by the hotel's Manager. Please address them to [email protected], marked for the attention of the Manager.
10. Children
This website is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect information from a child other than the name and age a parent gives us when booking a family room.
11. Links to other sites
Where this website links to an online travel agent, a map provider or another external site, that site has its own privacy policy and we are not responsible for it.
12. Changes to this policy
We will post any change here and update the date at the foot of the page.
Last updated: 18 September 2026.
Hotel Apsara
Hotel Apsara, Apsara Building, 6 Laden La Road, Chauk Bazaar, Darjeeling – 734101, West Bengal, India
Telephone: +91 354 225 2242 (reception, 24 hours) · Mobile / WhatsApp: +91 89678 57857
Email: [email protected]