If your first reaction to the notice was that it might be a phishing attempt, that is a sensible instinct and we would rather you kept it than lost it.
How to check without trusting the email
Do not click anything in the email. Instead, type our help centre address into your browser yourself: help.theyachtweek.com
If what the email told you matches what is published there, the email is ours. If you cannot find it there, treat the email as suspect.
You can also reply to the notice, or write to the notice address shown on it, and ask us to confirm. We will.
Why you may have received one after years of no contact
A notice arriving out of nowhere, about a trip you took a long time ago, feels exactly like a scam. The reason it is not is uncomfortable: we still held your record when we should not have. We had no retention schedule and no way to remove dormant accounts, so old records stayed in the database. The fuller explanation is in Why did you still have my data from a trip years ago?
If you booked through a friend, an organiser or a third party rather than directly with us, you may still have a record with us, because guest details had to be submitted for border and charter requirements.
What a genuine message from us will never do
We will never send you an unsolicited password reset link
We will never ask for your password
We will never ask for your card number, bank details or a payment
We will never ask you to confirm your passport details by email
We will never pressure you to act within a deadline
We will never telephone you about this incident — we are not making outbound calls
Anything doing one of those things is not from us, whatever it looks like.
Yacht Week account passwords were not among the data copied, so a message telling you your Yacht Week password has been compromised and inviting you to reset it through a link is a particularly clear sign of a fake. See Do I need to change my Yacht Week password?
Be more careful than usual for a while
Whoever holds this data knows real details about your travel with us — where you went, roughly when, and how to reach you. That makes a scam message far more convincing than the usual kind, because it can reference things only a genuine sender should know. Treat unexpected contact that mentions your trip as suspect until you have verified it independently.