Lobi · Bela Via, Inc.

Lobi Privacy Policy

Effective: 22 September 2026
Operator: Bela Via, Inc. ("Bela Via", "we", "us")
Contact: lobi.support@belaviatravel.com

Lobi is an iPhone app for ranking hotels you have stayed at and discovering hotels through people whose taste matches yours. This policy explains what Lobi collects, why, who it is shared with, and what you can do about it.

1. What we collect, and why

Account

Email address and password. Used to create and sign in to your account and to send you a confirmation code and password-reset codes. Your password is stored only as a one-way hash; we cannot read it.
Username, display name, bio and profile photo. Shown to other Lobi members beside your activity.

Your phone number, and your contacts

When you sign up, you may enter your phone number so friends can find you. We do not store the number. We store a one-way, keyed hash of it, generated with a secret that never leaves our database, and the hash cannot be turned back into a number.
If you allow Lobi to read your contacts, their phone numbers are hashed on your phone before anything leaves it. Only the hashes are sent, and only to ask "which of these belong to Lobi members?" We do not store your contacts, their names, or their numbers, and the hashes are discarded after the match.
Both are optional. Lobi works without them.

Location

If you allow it, Lobi reads your approximate location (to about a kilometre) while you are using the app, converts it to a city name on your phone, and uses the city to show hotels near you. Your location is not sent to our servers and is not stored.

Content you create

Stays, ratings and comparisons. Every hotel you log, the score it gets, and the pairwise choices you make while ranking it.
Reviews, highlights, photos and notes. Anything you write or attach to a stay.
Hotel class, price level and trip type. Your read on a hotel. These three are always private to you.
Likes, comments, saves, upcoming stays and follows.
Tags. When you tag another member as a companion on a stay, they can see that stay for as long as the tag exists, whatever its visibility.

Each stay has a visibility you choose: public (every member), friends (members you follow who follow you back) or private (you alone, plus anyone you tag). The visibility is enforced by our database, not only by the app.

Technical and diagnostic data

Crash and error reports. If the app crashes or an action fails, a report is sent to Sentry (see section 3) containing the device model, iOS version, app version, the sequence of screens leading up to it, the error, and your account's internal ID so we can ask you what happened. Reports do not include your email, name, contacts, location, photos or the text of your reviews.
Usage data on your phone. Recent searches and cached hotel details are kept on your device to make the app faster. They are not sent to us.

We do not use advertising identifiers, advertising networks, or analytics trackers, and we do not sell personal data.

2. How we use it

To run Lobi: your account, your rankings, your feed, and what other members see of you according to the visibility you chose.
To match you with people whose taste is similar and recommend hotels from their rankings. This uses only your ratings and theirs.
To show community averages, such as a hotel's typical class or price, computed from members' entries without identifying anyone.
To send you the emails the service needs: confirmation codes, password resets, and notices about your account. We do not send marketing email.
To find and fix problems, using the crash and error reports above.
To enforce our Terms, including handling reports of abuse.

3. Who we share it with

We use a small number of service providers to run Lobi. Each receives only what it needs.

Provider	What it does	What it receives
Supabase (Postgres on Amazon Web Services)	Hosts our database, authentication and photo storage	Everything in section 1 except location and raw contacts
Google (Places API)	Provides hotel names, addresses, photos and descriptions	The hotel names and cities you search for, and the identifiers of hotels you log. Google's privacy policy applies to that data. We store only Google's identifier for each hotel, plus its city and country
Apple (MapKit, App Store, TestFlight)	Map rendering; distributing the app	Standard Apple data under Apple's policies. Maps are drawn on your device
Sentry	Crash and error reporting	The diagnostic data described in section 1
Resend	Sends confirmation and password-reset emails	Your email address and the code

Other Lobi members see your profile and whatever you have made public or shared with friends. Anyone you tag sees the stay you tagged them on.

We will disclose data if required by law, to protect the safety of members, or as part of a merger or sale of Bela Via, in which case this policy continues to apply to the transferred data.

4. How long we keep it

Your account and content: until you delete your account.
Crash and error reports: 90 days at Sentry, then deleted automatically.
Backups: our database provider keeps backups for 7 days; deleted data ages out of them on that schedule.

5. Deleting your account

Settings ▸ Delete account removes your account and everything attached to it — profile, stays, ratings, reviews, photos, comments, likes, saves, follows, and your phone hash — immediately and permanently. Comments you left on other members' stays are removed with your account. You do not need to contact us to do this.

6. Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, export, or delete your personal data, to object to or restrict its processing, and to complain to a data-protection authority. Most of these you can do yourself in the app; for anything else, email lobi.support@belaviatravel.com and we will respond within 30 days. We will never treat you differently for exercising these rights.

If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, Bela Via, Inc. is the controller of your data, and our legal bases are performance of our contract with you (running the service), your consent (contacts, location, crash reporting where required), and our legitimate interests (keeping the service safe and working). Your data is processed in the United States.

7. Children

Lobi is not for children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect data from them. If you believe a child has an account, email lobi.support@belaviatravel.com and we will delete it.

8. Security

Data travels over HTTPS. Access rules are enforced in our database for every request, so a stay you marked private is not readable by anyone else even if they bypass the app. Photos on reviews are served through short-lived signed links. No system is perfectly secure, and we will tell you if a breach affects you.

9. Changes

We will post any change here and update the date at the top. If a change materially reduces your rights, we will tell you in the app first.

10. Contact

lobi.support@belaviatravel.com Bela Via, Inc.