Trust & Safety

Trust & Safety

LakeBooking is a booking platform. We connect anglers with hosts — we don't run the lakes, we don't supervise the fishing, and we don't insure the day. What we do take seriously is being a trustworthy place to find and book a session: verified hosts, secure payments, honest reviews, and respectful handling of your data.

Here's how each of those works.

Verifying hosts

Every host on LakeBooking goes through a light verification before their lake appears in search:

• We confirm the business details they register with.
• We verify the identity of the person responsible for the account.
• We check a document showing they're entitled to take bookings on the lake (deed, lease, management contract, or ANPA authorisation).

Hosts who clear all three carry a Verified Host label on their listing. There's no paid tier above this — verification is the standard.

Verifying anglers

Anglers verify their email and phone number when they sign up. Both are needed before a booking can be confirmed. The phone number is shared with the host only 24 hours before the session, so they can reach you if anything changes at the gate.

Payments

Card payments are processed by Stripe, a PCI-DSS Level 1 provider. Card details never touch LakeBooking servers — they go directly to Stripe in encrypted form. 3D Secure is required for first-time international cards and any payment above €300.

In our current setup, anglers pay a flat 10% booking fee online via Stripe to secure the booking; the remaining balance is paid directly to the host at the lake on arrival. The booking fee counts toward the total booking value — it isn't an extra charge. This split is intentional: it keeps things simple, keeps refund mechanics transparent, and never asks you to send money outside the platform. Full online payments via Stripe Connect are something we'll add in due course.

If a host ever asks you to pay outside the platform — bank transfer, Revolut, anything off-app — please decline and let us know at contact@lakebooking.com. The platform's protection only works while the money is on it.

Reviews

We keep reviews honest:

• Only anglers with a completed session can leave one — we check the session end time, not just the booking.
• Hosts can respond publicly to any review.
• We don't edit reviews once posted, and we don't remove them just for being negative.
• We do remove reviews that contain personal data, threats, or content unrelated to the session.

Your data and privacy

Data handling is covered in detail in our Privacy Policy. The short version: we collect what we need to make bookings work, share only what's needed with the host (your name and — close to the session — your phone), process payments via Stripe so we never store card numbers, and comply fully with GDPR 2016/679.

You can request, correct, or delete your data at any time by writing to contact@lakebooking.com.

What we don't do

We try to be honest about the limits of our role:

• We're not responsible for what happens on the lake itself. The fishing, the safety of the bank, the conduct of other anglers, and the conditions on the day are matters between the host (who operates the water) and you (who fishes it). We're the booking layer in between.
• We don't insure your gear, vehicle, or person. Angling-specific insurance is widely available and inexpensive — well worth considering.
• We don't verify individual catch claims. Reviews and host stocking records stand for themselves.

If something goes wrong with a booking

If your booking turns out to be substantively not what was advertised — the listing was inaccurate, the host cancels at the gate, your details are misused — open the booking, message the host with the evidence, and escalate to contact@lakebooking.com if it isn't resolved; we'll step in. Our refund and mediation rules are spelled out in the Refund Policy.

For anything else, we're at contact@lakebooking.com. A real person reads every message.