What we know about you, and what it does

• We hold your mobile number, the name you gave the restaurant, and the bookings you made — including anything you typed into them.
• No card. No email address. No home address. We do not store your IP address, we set no advertising cookies, and there are no trackers on the booking page.
• We never sell your data and we never text you marketing. Every message we send is about a booking you made.
• We keep a private reliability score on you, built from whether you turned up. It can change which tables you are offered. You are never shown it. That is the part of this page most worth reading — it is further down.

Turn is operated by Thomas Lawson, of 22 The Meadows, Romsey, SO51 0GX. Under the UK and EU General Data Protection Regulation we are the data controller for everything described on this page.

Everything below reaches a person at hello@turnreservations.click.

A restaurant you book with is a data controller too, for its own copy of your booking and for what it does with it. This notice covers Turn. What the restaurant does at its end is theirs.

Your mobile number

This is your account — there is no password and no sign-up. It is how we find your booking when you come back, and how the confirmation and reminder reach you. Without it there is no booking.

Your name

Whatever you asked the restaurant to call you. We do not check it.

Your bookings

Date, time, party size, which table, and what happened — confirmed, you came, you cancelled, you didn't turn up. Also the time you were actually sat down, when staff record it.

Anything you wrote into a booking

The occasion, and any note for the kitchen. Please don't put anything in there you wouldn't want a restaurant to read — it goes to them, because that is the entire point of it.

Allergies and dietary requirements

If you tell us about an allergy, that is information about your health, and the law treats it more carefully than the rest. We collect it only because you typed it in so a kitchen would see it, and we use it for nothing else — it plays no part in your score, and it is never used to decide anything about you. You can clear it at any time from the link in your text. The list you can tick is: gluten, dairy, eggs, nuts, peanuts, shellfish, fish, soy, sesame, plus anything you write yourself.

Messages between you and the restaurant

If you reply to one of our texts, the reply and the thread it belongs to are stored so the restaurant can answer you. We log that a message was sent, to which number, which message it was, whether it arrived and what it cost us — that last one is how a restaurant's bill is worked out.

Whether you told us to stop

Reply STOP and we record that, permanently, so we don't text you again anywhere on Turn. Keeping that flag is the only way to honour it.

Ratings you leave

Your star rating of a restaurant, and any comment. These feed the restaurant's public score. Only recent ratings count towards it, and a restaurant needs more than a couple before any score shows at all — one bad night is not a verdict.

Whether you added the booking to your phone's wallet

If you save the pass, we record that you did and an identifier for it, so we can keep the pass up to date when the booking changes.

If you book a prepaid table

What you bought and what you paid, so the restaurant and you both have a record of it. You pay on Stripe's own page — your card number never reaches us.

If you split that bill, we hold the name and mobile number you type in for each person and how many covers they are paying for, and we text each of them once with a link to their own share. That is the whole of it: no email, no second message, and their number is used for nothing else. They are deleted with the booking, and anyone named can ask us to take their details out at any time.

If you are reading this because you got one of those texts: somebody you were eating with typed your number in. You can ignore it, and you can ask us to delete it.

Your reliability score

Its own section, below.

No card or bank details. An ordinary booking takes no money from you at all and there is nowhere on the booking page to enter a card. Some restaurants sell tables paid for in advance; if you buy one, you pay on Stripe's own page and your card number still never reaches us — we are told it was paid and nothing more. No email address. No postal address. No date of birth. No location. We do not store your IP address: it is held in memory for a few minutes to stop somebody hammering the booking form, and never written down. There is no analytics script, no advertising pixel and no third-party cookie on any page a guest sees.

One cookie. Turn sets a single session cookie: it carries you from the number step to your booking, remembers the language you chose, and keeps a restaurant's staff signed in. It holds nothing about you beyond that, it is strictly necessary for the site to work, and so it needs no banner and no consent. Visits to the site are counted without any cookie at all.

Turn exists because restaurants lose money on empty tables. Instead of taking a deposit off you, we keep a score. It is a decision made about you by software, and it can change what you are offered, so here is what it does and what moves it.

How it works

Turn runs an algorithm that scores guests, and scores restaurants the same way pointed the other direction. Yours is worked out from your own booking history with us and nothing else — no credit data, no information bought from anyone, nothing about you from anywhere outside Turn.

Everyone starts at the top, and a brand new guest is indistinguishable from a good regular. That is deliberate. From there:

• Turning up helps, and so does leaving feedback.
• Cancelling costs you a little, deliberately so — we would far rather you cancelled than left a table empty, and cancelling late is still much better than not appearing.
• Not turning up at all is what really matters, and costs you more than anything else you can do. It is the only one that leaves a restaurant with an empty table on a Saturday.
• A restaurant cancelling on you costs you nothing. That one counts against the restaurant instead.

We are still tuning how much each of those is worth, so this page describes what moves your score rather than by exactly how much. The direction never changes: turning up is always good for you and never turning up is always bad for you. If you want to know where you stand, ask us — If you think it's wrong, below, says how.

What it actually does

It is how Turn does away with deposits. A reliable guest gets the whole room: every time and every table size, and, as Turn learns, longer at the table. A guest who often does not turn up gets less where it matters: fewer times and fewer table sizes when a restaurant is busy, and shorter at the table. Never a deposit, and never money.

Each restaurant decides whether it applies there, and how strongly. Where a restaurant has not switched it on, your score changes nothing about what you are offered there.

It cannot make you unbookable across Turn, and it is never passed to a restaurant as a number for them to judge you by. A restaurant sees the bookings you made with them and how those went. It does not see your history anywhere else.

It forgets

Only recent behaviour counts. An old bad night stops affecting you after a while and nothing we do keeps it alive. There is no permanent blacklist, there is no way for a restaurant to put you on one, and nothing here follows you around forever.

See yours

Your data page shows your score, and every booking that is moving it, on request.

If you think it's wrong

Email hello@turnreservations.click from a number we can match. A person will look at it — not the software — and we will correct or remove anything that is wrong, or that was somebody else's fault. You are entitled to that, and to object to the scoring altogether, under Article 22 of the GDPR. Say so and we will deal with your bookings by hand.

Why we say we're allowed to do it

Our lawful basis is legitimate interests: no-shows are a real and measurable cost to small restaurants, the score replaces taking a deposit off you, it uses only what you did with us, it expires, and the most it does is narrow which times and tables you are offered at a busy restaurant. We think that is a fair trade. If you think it isn't, the paragraph above is your remedy and we will not argue with you about it.

• To do the thing you asked — taking, holding, changing and cancelling your booking, and texting you about it. Article 6(1)(b), the contract you entered when you booked.
• Legitimate interests, Article 6(1)(f) — the reliability score, stopping abuse of the booking form, and keeping the message log we bill restaurants from.
• Your explicit consent, Article 9(2)(a) — allergy and dietary information, which is health data. You give it by typing it in, and you can withdraw it by clearing the field.
• A legal obligation, Article 6(1)(c) — records we have to keep, such as those behind a restaurant's invoice.

The restaurant you booked with

Your name, number, booking and anything you wrote into it. They can also mark you as a favourite. They see how you have behaved with them, and not with anybody else.

Other restaurants on Turn

Nothing. They cannot see that you have ever booked anywhere else. The only thing that crosses between them is the score, and only as an effect — never as a number they are shown.

Companies that carry the work

They only ever get what they need to do their job, they act on our instructions, and none of them are allowed to use your data for themselves:

• Telnyx — sends and receives the text messages. Gets your number and the message.
• Resend — sends email. Restaurant accounts only; guests get no email from us.
• Google — if you add a booking to Google Wallet, the pass and its updates go through Google.
• Apple — the same, if and when Apple Wallet is offered.
• Meta — only if you choose to message a restaurant on WhatsApp.
• Fly.io — hosts the servers and the database.
• Stripe — takes the money. For an ordinary booking you never meet them: they only collect what the restaurant pays us. If you pay for a table in advance, you pay on Stripe's own page and give them your card and your email — we never see or hold a card number.

We will also hand something over if the law actually requires it — a court order, not an email that says it's urgent.

On servers in London. Some of the companies above are based in the United States, so some data reaches there; those transfers run on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses, the UK Addendum, or the EU–US Data Privacy Framework, depending on the company.

Your score only ever counts recent behaviour, so its raw material stops mattering well before the rest of this does.

A booking that is never confirmed frees its table after 15 minutes and stops being a booking.

After 12 months without a booking, you are anonymised automatically. Your name, your number, your allergy information, anything you wrote into a booking and every message between you and a restaurant are stripped out, and the links we texted you stop working. What is left is a row saying a table of four ate on a Tuesday, which is the restaurant's own trading history and has nobody's name on it.

We anonymise rather than delete so that a restaurant's covers figures don't change retrospectively underneath them. Nothing that can identify you survives it, and it is not reversible — we cannot get your history back afterwards and neither can anyone else.

One honest exception: we keep copies of the database so it can be recovered after a failure, and they roll over every month. Anything deleted or anonymised can survive in those copies for up to 30 days, untouched and unread, until it falls out of the last one. They are only ever used to restore the service.

Ask us sooner and we will do it sooner, which is the next section.

Do it yourself, now: see your data — we text a link to your number, and the page shows everything we hold, your score and what moved it, lets you download it, and lets you delete it.

Or email hello@turnreservations.click from — or quoting — the mobile number you booked with. We answer within 30 days and it costs nothing.

• See it — a copy of everything we hold on you.
• Fix it — correct anything wrong, including your score.
• Delete it — we remove your number, name and history. Note that a restaurant keeps its own record of a booking it actually served, which it is entitled to do.
• Object — to the score, or to anything else we do on legitimate interests.
• Take it with you — your data in a machine-readable file.
• Stop the texts — reply STOP to any message. It takes effect immediately, across every restaurant on Turn, and costs you nothing: no score penalty, and it does not cancel your booking.

One security note. The link in your text is the key to your booking — anyone who has it can change or cancel it. That is why there is no password. Don't post it publicly.

Tell us first — hello@turnreservations.click. If we don't put it right you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (UK), or to the regulator in the country you live in. You do not need our permission and we won't hold it against you.

Turn isn't for under-16s. We don't knowingly hold data on one; tell us if we have and it goes.

If we change something that matters — new data, a new use, a new company handling it — we update this page and change the date at the bottom. We will not quietly start doing something with your data that this page doesn't describe.

Last updated 9 October 2026. See also the messaging policy, the terms, and help.