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Guide · data protection

Your restaurant's guest list after Quandoo: what you may keep, send and must delete

Sometime before 31 December 2026 a spreadsheet of your guests lands in your inbox. It is tempting to treat it as one list. In law it is three, and only one of them is a mailing list.

Published · A practical guide, not legal advice.

Sort the file into three before you use it

What you need to serve a booking

Name, phone, e-mail, date, time, party size. You may use these to look after the booking the guest made: to confirm it, to warn them of a change, to find them if they leave a coat. This is service, not marketing.

What you know about a regular

Visits, preferences, the note that says “table by the window, always”. Useful, personal, and worth keeping only while it helps you serve that guest. A note about an allergy is health information and deserves the most care of all.

Who agreed to hear from you

The tick in a box, with its date and its wording. This, and only this, decides who may get your newsletter — and if it is not in the file, you do not have it.

Who is responsible for the list now

The ICO's test is simple to state: the controller decides why and how personal data is used; a processor handles it on the controller's instructions. Your guests booked a table with you, and when the file is on your computer, every decision about it is yours. That makes your restaurant the one that answers for it.

It also explains what you could ask Quandoo for. Where a processor held data for you, UK GDPR says that at the end of the service it deletes or returns the personal data, at the controller's choice. Quandoo has said it keeps data after the shutdown only as long as the law requires, and then deletes or anonymises it. Where Quandoo had its own relationship with a diner — an account on its website — that part was its own, not yours.

The newsletter question, answered carefully

Under the e-mail marketing rules the ICO enforces (PECR), you need either consent or the “soft opt-in”. The soft opt-in has three conditions, and all three must hold: you got the person's details directly from them in the course of a sale or negotiations for a sale; you are marketing your own similar products or services; and you gave them a simple chance to opt out when you collected the details, and in every message since.

The awkward condition is the third. If guests booked through a form you did not control, they may never have been offered your opt-out at the moment of booking. In that case the soft opt-in is hard to rely on, and the safe course is to e-mail only those with a recorded consent — and to ask everyone else, next time they book with you directly, whether they would like to hear from you.

The Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 changed parts of these rules, mainly for charities, so read the ICO's current page before a first send.

Housekeeping the move creates

  1. A contract with your new system

    When a booking system holds guest data for you, it is your processor, and UK GDPR wants a written contract between you. A serious provider has one ready; ask for it before you upload anything.

  2. A line in your privacy notice

    Your website's privacy notice should name how you take bookings now. If it still says Quandoo, change it on the same day as the booking button.

  3. A retention rule you can say out loud

    Decide how long you keep a guest who has not been back, write it down, and delete accordingly. The Quandoo export is a good first test: what you will not use, delete in January.

  4. One place for requests

    If a guest asks what you hold about them or asks you to delete it, you need to find every copy — including the spreadsheet on the office laptop.

How Slotora helps with the last three

  • One guest's data can be exported in one step when they ask for it, and a guest who asks to be forgotten can be erased from the guest card, so the request is answered in the system rather than in a spreadsheet nobody can find. A guest can stop messages with one click.
  • An allergy goes in its own field on the guest card, written by your staff, rather than in a note that travels with every booking. It is still health data under Article 9, so keep there only what the kitchen needs.
  • Every change in the book is recorded with who made it, and the record is kept for two years — useful when you need to show what happened.
  • The guest book keeps the newsletter question separate: its mailing export holds only the guests who said yes to marketing. Slotora sends no marketing itself, and a name in your old export does not become a yes by being imported.
  • In Slotora, your own export file — CSV or Excel — goes through the import: you check which column holds what and see a preview, past bookings become visit history, and an import can be undone. We help if you want us to.

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Sources

How to get the export out of Quandoo · Quandoo has closed: the switch page · All guides