Privacy notice

Saddle-Up is operated by QTUM LTD, a company registered in England and Wales (company number 15578671), registered office 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London, WC2H 9JQ, United Kingdom. QTUM LTD is registered with the UK Information Commissioner's Office (registration number 00016132670) and is the data controller for accounts, profiles, bookings, messages, reviews, the platform's safety records and platform administration.

Saddle-Up lists riding centres in the United Kingdom only. Riders living in the EEA may create an account to book rides at those UK centres; their information is handled under this notice and their EU GDPR rights are respected as described below.

Each riding centre is a separate, independent controller for the information it receives about riders through Saddle-Up and for records it keeps itself (for example its own accident book, insurance or accounts). Where a centre uses Saddle-Up's tools to run its own records, we follow the centre's instructions for that processing and the centre's own privacy notice also applies.

Contact our privacy team at privacy@saddle-up.app. Questions about this notice, your rights or a concern about how information is used can be sent there, and we will reply within one month.

• Rider accounts — adults booking rides for themselves.
• Parents, guardians and bookers — rider accounts that manage profiles for children, family members or friends, and the people in those profiles.
• Centre accounts — owners, managers and staff of riding centres.
• Coaches — coaches invited by a centre, including those who use the coach portal.
• Riders added by a centre — people a centre records so it can book them, who may not have a Saddle-Up login.
• Visitors — anyone browsing public pages without signing in.
• Emergency contacts and witnesses — people named by a rider or recorded by a centre in a safety report.

• Account details — full name, an optional nickname, email address, phone number, password (stored only as a one-way secure hash), age or date of birth, postcode, profile photo, your account type and your notification choices.
• Riding profile — riding level (as you describe it and, separately, as a centre assesses it), experience, confidence, disciplines, goals, how often you ride, jump height, whether you own a horse or your own tack.
• Body measurements — height and weight, used for horse welfare: every horse has a safe weight and size range and we will not pair a rider beyond it.
• Health, support and safety information — medical notes, access or support needs, and an emergency contact's name and phone number. Health information is special category data and has extra protection (see sections 9 and 10).
• Bookings and activity — rides requested, booked, rescheduled, cancelled and completed, booking references, prices shown, the horse, coach and arena allocated and why, waitlist places, and signed waivers or declarations.
• Progress and pairing records — coach assessments and progress notes, and your private feedback on how rides with particular horses went, including a "do not pair again" choice. Only riders can give this feedback; centres can read it.
• Messages between you and riding centres, and in-app notifications. We do not send marketing or notification emails; account emails are limited to sign-up confirmation, password reset and invitations.
• Reviews you write about a centre after a ride, any centre reply, and "helpful" votes.
• Safety incidents — if something happens during a ride, the centre records what happened, who was involved, first aid or medical attention, witnesses and actions taken.
• Technical information — sign-in records, the IP address seen by our hosting providers, browser type and error logs used to keep the service working and secure.

Most of this comes from you. Some comes from riding centres (assessments, allocations, incidents, or a profile a centre creates for you), and from people who book for you.

You must be 18 or over to hold an account. A rider account can add and manage profiles for children it has parental responsibility for, and for family members or friends it books for.

• By adding someone, you confirm you have their permission (or, for a child, parental responsibility) and that you will tell them how their information is used. Adults you add can be invited to claim their own profile and take it over.
• Children do not have their own login. Their profile is managed by the parent or guardian who created it, who can exercise the child's data rights. Older children can also contact us directly about their own information.
• We follow the ICO's Age Appropriate Design Code principles: children's information is used only to arrange and run their rides safely, privacy-protective settings are the default, we do not profile children for marketing, and we never show them advertising.
• A riding centre only sees the specific person who is booking, waiting or messaging with it — never your full family list.
• When you remove someone, they disappear from your lists straight away. Their past rides, reviews and safety records are kept (hidden) for the retention periods in section 12, because centres may need them for safety or legal reasons.

If you own a horse you can add it: name, photo, age, sex, breed, colour, height, disciplines, current work, temperament, health, behaviour and transport notes, an emergency contact and documents such as passports or vaccination records. These details may identify you as the owner.

Your horse's details are private to you by default. A centre only sees them if you share the horse with that centre, and you can stop sharing at any time. If you propose your horse for a booking, the details at that moment are attached to the booking so the centre can plan safely.

Centres only see riders they have a genuine relationship with — someone who has messaged them, is on their waitlist, has booked with them, or is a rider they manage. What they see grows in stages so you never overshare with a centre you are only enquiring with:

• New enquiry (you have messaged but not booked): name and nickname, contact details, age, riding level, disciplines, goals, height and weight, and whether you own a horse. Health, support needs, emergency contact and pairing exclusions are not shown.
• Booked (you have an upcoming ride or waitlist place): the above plus medical notes, support needs and emergency contact, so the centre can keep you safe.
• Rides with you (you have completed a ride there): the above plus your ride history at that centre, horses you have ridden and pairing notes.

A centre never sees your bookings, messages or notes with any other centre. Centre staff cannot change the personal details you own; they can add their own assessment of your level and private staff notes for running your rides. You can ask a centre what notes it holds about you.

Public information: approved centre listings and reviews are visible to anyone, including search engines. Reviews show the reviewer's first name (and profile photo, if set), the activity and the month — never the booking reference or exact date.

• Centre listing — name, address, location, contact details, website, photos and captions, services, prices, opening hours, rider age and weight limits, approvals, and licence and insurance expiry dates. Photos may be imported from the centre's own website only after a centre manager confirms them.
• Owners and staff — name, email, phone, role, invitations and an audit trail of important actions (such as overriding suitability advice or changing bookings).
• Coaches — name, photo, bio, qualifications and DBS, first-aid and insurance expiry dates, so compliance reminders can be given. We hold expiry dates and whether a check is in place, not the content of a DBS certificate or any criminal record details.
• Horses and operations — horses and their welfare records (workload, rest days, vet, farrier and stand-down dates), arenas, schedules and timetables.

Owners, staff and coaches should avoid adding personal information to public listings unless they are happy for it to be public.

A centre can add a rider who books by phone or in person. The centre is the controller for that record and must tell the rider about it. If the rider later accepts an invitation and claims the profile, it becomes theirs and only they can change their personal details.

• Contract — to create your account, take and manage bookings, pass the right details to the centre, let you message it, and provide centre tools to centre accounts.
• Legitimate interests — keeping the service secure, preventing fraud and misuse, moderating reviews and reported content, matching riders to suitable horses, approving centres before they are listed, supporting users, correcting errors, and improving the service. We have balanced these interests against your rights; you can ask for details and you can object (section 13).
• Legal obligation — keeping records we or centres must keep (such as accident records), responding to lawful requests, and meeting consumer, online safety and platform rules.
• Consent — optional analytics cookies, and any optional information you choose to give. You can withdraw consent at any time.

Health and other special category data are processed only with your explicit consent when you provide them, or where needed to protect someone's vital interests in an emergency, or to establish or defend legal claims (for example after an accident). We hold an appropriate policy document as required by the Data Protection Act 2018. You choose what to tell us and can withdraw by removing it, but a centre may then be unable to accept a booking safely.

Safety, welfare and allocation decisions use fixed, published rules — for example, a horse's weight limit or an existing booking that would clash. These rules can stop a booking from being made for a horse, coach, arena or rider, to protect people and animals. Where a rule stops something, centre staff can review it and arrange an alternative, and you can ask us to explain the outcome and contest it.

AI features only explain, suggest and help draft. They never decide whether you can ride, and their suggestions are reviewed by a person. Information imported by AI (for example from a centre's website) stays as a draft until a person confirms it. We do not use your information to train AI models.

We do not sell your information, and we do not share it with advertisers or data brokers. We share it only with:

• Riding centres you interact with, in the stages in section 6.
• Supabase — database, sign-in and file storage.
• Website hosting and delivery providers that serve the site and process your IP address to deliver pages and block attacks.
• AI model providers — our riding concierge sends only what you type and public listing information; centre assistants send scheduling information. Providers act on our instructions and may not use it to train their models. We record usage (not the conversation) for monitoring.
• Weather providers — receive only a centre's location. No personal information is sent.
• Google Analytics (optional) — only with your consent. It measures visits, traffic sources, approximate location, device information and page categories. We do not send names, emails, rider details, messages, record identifiers, invitation tokens or search text. Advertising features and Google signals are disabled.
• Authorities and others where required — for example the police, emergency services, local authority safeguarding teams, the Health and Safety Executive, a court, or our professional advisers and insurers, only where the law requires or allows it, or to protect someone from serious harm.
• A buyer or successor — if Saddle-Up is reorganised or sold, under the same protections as this notice.

Every service provider works under a written contract that limits use to our instructions and requires security and confidentiality. Fonts are served from our own site, so loading a page does not send your IP address to a font provider.

• Account and profile — while your account is open. After you close it, we delete or anonymise it within 30 days, except records below we must keep.
• Booking records — six years after the ride, to deal with claims, insurance and accounting questions.
• Safety incident records — cannot be edited after recording and are kept for six years; for children, until they turn 21 or for six years, whichever is longer.
• Messages and reviews — for the same period as the related bookings, unless you ask us to delete them sooner and there is no safety or legal reason to keep them.
• Audit trails (including administrator corrections) — six years.
• Technical logs — normally no more than 90 days.
• Analytics — Google Analytics data is kept for no more than 14 months.

Depending on the lawful basis, you have the right to:

• be told how your information is used (this notice);
• get a copy of your information, including for a child you are responsible for;
• have inaccurate information corrected — most of it you can edit yourself;
• have your information deleted;
• restrict how we use it;
• object to processing based on legitimate interests;
• receive information you gave us in a portable, machine-readable format;
• not be subject to decisions based solely on automated processing that significantly affect you;
• withdraw consent at any time, without affecting earlier processing.

Email privacy@saddle-up.app from your account email. It is free, and we reply within one month (we may extend this by two more months for complex requests and will tell you why). We may need to confirm your identity. We may keep safety records and information we are legally required to keep, and we will tell you what we have kept and why. You can also ask each riding centre directly about records it holds.

If you are unhappy, please tell us first. You can also complain to the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk, 0303 123 1113) or, if you are in the EEA, to the data protection authority in your country.

A small number of authorised Saddle-Up administrators can access records to approve, hide or restore centre listings, manage accounts and roles, switch features on or off for account types, handle support requests, moderate reported reviews, investigate safety concerns and keep the service secure. Administrators can correct a member's details only to fix an error or a support issue; each correction requires a written reason and the old and new values are kept in an audit trail. Administrators are bound by confidentiality and access is limited to these purposes.

Access is checked on every request inside the database itself: riders see only their own records and those they manage, and centre staff see only their own centre and the riders linked to it, in the stages above. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, passwords are hashed, and staff access is role-based and logged. If a personal data breach is likely to put your rights at risk we will report it to the ICO (and any relevant EEA authority) within 72 hours of becoming aware, and tell you without undue delay if the risk is high.

Some providers may process data outside the UK or EEA. Where they do, we rely on UK adequacy regulations or EU adequacy decisions (including the UK Extension and EU-US Data Privacy Framework where the provider is certified), or on the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or Addendum and the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, with a transfer risk assessment. You can ask us for a copy of the safeguards used.

How we use cookies and browser storage is explained in our cookies notice. Safeguarding concerns are handled as described in our safeguarding statement. We will announce important changes to this notice in the app before they take effect, and the date at the bottom of this page shows when it was last updated.