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, which means verified hosts, secure payments, honest reviews, and respectful handling of your data.
Here's how each of those works.
Verifying hosts
A lake earns the Verified badge when its host asks for it and our team reviews and approves the lake, once its setup is complete (lake profile, swims, packages and prices, rules, contact details and the host's tax details). A lake can take bookings before it's verified. Search results stay ordered by distance whether a lake is verified or not; the lakes directory lists verified lakes first. There's no paid tier above the badge.
A host whose lake is verified shows the same badge on their fishing experiences and host page. There's no separate badge for hosts.
Some listings we add ourselves so anglers can find those lakes. They show as unclaimed until their operator takes them over.
Verifying anglers
Anglers verify their email address when they sign up, and a booking needs a verified address. The host sees your name when you book. Your email address and phone number (if you added one) reach them once your booking is confirmed, and you get the lake's contact details at the same time, so either side can reach the other 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. Your bank may ask you to confirm a payment with 3D Secure.
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.
- 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. In short, we collect what we need to make bookings work, share only what's needed with the host (your name, email address and phone number), 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, and well worth considering.
- We don't verify individual catch claims. Reviews and the fish stock a host declares 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.