Privacy Policy

Nothing is more important to the Vancouver International Wine Festival (“VanWineFest”) than the satisfaction of our patrons. We place the utmost importance on our relationship with you, and so have undertaken a comprehensive program to ensure that we are complying not only with privacy legislation, but also with the needs and concerns of the individuals who form the backbone of our business.

Important Alert:

The festival does not share or sell its mailing or email lists. It has come to our attention that in recent months a fraudulent offer to purchase VIWF attendees lists is circulating from third party sources.  We have been assured by our ticketing and IT contractors that all our information is secure; if you receive an email, please report it to the festival, but don’t act on it.  Any list you would receive would not be legitimate or accurately reflect festival attendees. These incidents are being reported to the appropriate authorities.

In our previous contacts with you, we have collected personal details necessary to the completion of our business transactions. These details may include, but are not limited to, your name, company, contact information, ticketing, and credit card information. In some cases, if you have developed a closer relationship with VanWineFest, we may have recorded details about your personal preferences that help us anticipate your needs. This information is primarily gathered when you purchase tickets or when you provide us with financial and/or volunteer support.

The information we collect is vital to maintaining the level of customer service you have come to expect – and deserve – from VanWineFest. Maintaining a history of your transactions allows us to best serve your ticketing needs. From time to time we will send you information about upcoming events we believe will be of interest to you. Our box office representatives may also contact you to confirm purchases. We do everything in our power to co-ordinate points of contact so that our patrons receive only a reasonable number of letters/brochures, emails or phone calls.

We do not exchange lists of names and addresses with other organizations, but we will provide the lists to participating restaurants or event venues for winery dinner events. Lists may also be provided to a third party data and mailing house. The contracted third party must comply with strict data privacy standards, including rules and guidelines of the federal privacy legislation, and is required to destroy the information supplied after one use.

Only authorised personnel have access to this information. We use EzTix, an internet event ticketing system with a secured server, where the majority of information is held.

The ticketing company uses reasonable security measures to store and maintain personal identifying information so as to protect it from loss, misuse, alteration or destruction by unauthorized parties while it is under their control. EzTix uses secure socket layer (“SSL”) encryption when transmitting certain kinds of information, such as payment information, over the Internet.

Financial transactions (such as ticket orders or invoices) are kept in secure storage for the minimum amount of time required through accounting principles and then are destroyed.

We do our best to ensure that all information is recorded accurately – if you notice any errors in our correspondence with you or if your personal information changes, please contact our office coordinator at 604-629-2103 or email info@vanwinefest.ca.

If you do not wish to be contacted by phone, mail or email, please contact us and we will ensure that your request is honoured. You may unsubscribe to our email list through Constant Contact at any time.

If you have any questions about VanWineFest’s privacy policy or concerns about the way that your information is being used, please contact our Privacy Officer by email at privacy@vanwinefest.ca.

Our website is fully GDPR compliant as of 2018. This is a list of the data we store, and cookies and scripts we use:

Social Media Feed
Our site uses an embedded feed of our Twitter account to display our posts. This feed uses cookies for setting your language, Twitter account session ID, and expiry date for that session. It also loads a script from Twitters servers to display our posts.

Google Invisible reCAPTCHA
Google uses a session cookie and script to monitor for malicious bots on our website. This protects and secures our website and email accounts, which in turn protects you.

Contact Form Submissions
By submitting a contact form on our website, you are sending an email to our email account. The information you submit is stored in our email accounts and also in a database for backup in case of a email deliver-ability issue.