This page covers both Yacht Week and Ski Week. The timeline is the same for both.
Short answer: if you delete your account yourself from your profile page, it happens immediately — not as a request into a queue, but there and then. If you ask us by email instead, your request is logged the day you send it and we confirm by email when your record is done.
The immediate route
Log in, open Edit profile, and use the Go off radar button in the Danger zone panel at the bottom. It shows you exactly what we hold before you confirm, lets you download a copy first, and runs the deletion the moment you confirm. The full walkthrough is in the article on deleting your account, in your brand's collection.
The one case it cannot handle is a confirmed trip that has not finished yet — we need your details to run the trip, so the button unlocks on its last day.
The written route, and why we will not promise you three days
Several people have asked for confirmation within 24, 48 or 72 hours of an emailed request. We understand the impulse, and we are not going to agree to a date we would then miss.
An emailed deletion is not one action. We first have to match your message to the right record without deleting the wrong person's data, and check it against what we are legally required to keep. The law gives us up to one month to respond, extendable in complex cases. We expect to be well inside that, and we would rather tell you the real position than the comfortable one.
If you can log in, the button removes the waiting entirely.
What happens on which timeline
Immediately — self-service deletion from your profile page, confirmed by one final email
Same day — an emailed request is logged and acknowledged
Within one month — the statutory limit for responding to an emailed erasure request
On completion — we email you to confirm
If you have accounts with both brands
Yacht Week and Ski Week are separate companies and hold separate records, so deleting one account does not close the other. Self-service means doing it once on each site. If you are asking by email instead, say so in one message and we will handle them together.
What deleting does not undo
Deleting your account removes your data from our systems going forward. It does not retrieve what was already copied in August, and nobody can offer you that.
It also does not change what you should do about your password, and that differs by brand. Ski Week account passwords were among the data copied — change yours, and change it anywhere you reused it. Yacht Week account passwords were not copied, though reused passwords are still worth changing elsewhere. That risk is unaffected by whether your account still exists.
If you are unhappy with how long it takes
You can complain to your national data protection authority at any point, and you do not need our agreement to do it. We have already reported this incident to the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) and the Swedish Authority for Privacy Protection (IMY), under separate case references for each company.