The notice is genuine. You may never have had a Yacht Week account, and you were never meant to have one. We still held your details, and here is why.
Why Yacht Week had your details
Port and border authorities require identity details for everyone on board a trip — guests, crew and Event Team alike. That list is held in the Yacht Week system by the company running the trip. So a record can exist with your name, email address, passport number and date of birth in it without you ever having signed up for anything.
There are a few ways that happens:
You worked a trip as crew. Your account is with Quarterdeck. The crew list for the trip sits with Yacht Week.
You were on the Event Team for a trip. We hold a limited set of details needed to run the booking.
Someone added you to a booking's crew list. Often at short notice, entered by our team rather than by you.
You deleted your Yacht Week account previously — see below.
Whichever applies, that record was among the data copied in August. That is why you heard from us.
Why you cannot log in
Because there is nothing to log in to. If you try, you will be told that no profile exists for your email address. That is expected — it is not an error, and it is not a sign that the notice was fake.
It also means the download and delete buttons described in the notice do not apply to you. Those are for people who have a Yacht Week account.
If you deleted your Yacht Week account before this
Deleting your account removed the account. It did not remove crew list entries created for individual trips, because those are separate records tied to the trip rather than to your profile, and the deletion did not reach them.
That is a gap on our side and we are not going to dress it up. We are correcting it so that deleting an account also removes these records. In the meantime, if it applies to you, write to us and we will remove what we still hold.
If you have a Quarterdeck account, this is the part that needs action
Your Quarterdeck account was affected as well — the same incident, a different record, held by a different company.
Quarterdeck account passwords were among the data copied. Yacht Week passwords were not, but that statement only covers Yacht Week accounts, and you do not have one. So the password that matters to you does need changing.
Change it now, and change it anywhere you have used the same or a similar password: Do I need to change my Quarterdeck password?
If you received two notices, they are not duplicates
One from Yacht Week and one from Quarterdeck describe two different records, held by two different companies. Keep both — each lists what applied to that record, and each is your evidence of what was involved.
How to get a copy of what we hold, or have it deleted
Write to notice@theyachtweek.com with the name and email address you were listed under, and we will handle it in writing.
That takes longer than a button — up to the statutory month — but the right exists and we are not going to make a login the only way to use it.
One thing we cannot remove: lists already submitted to port and border authorities. Once sent, those are out of our hands.
The rest of the answers about the incident are here: What was copied in the incident? and Why did you still have my data from a trip years ago?