SUP Buddies Terms & Conditions

1. About these Terms

These Terms & Conditions govern your access to and use of SUP Buddies, including the SUP Buddies website, app, account, community features, Trip plans, scheduled Trips, invitations, records, and related services.

SUP Buddies is a trading name of SPO Investments Ltd, a company registered in Wales under company number 08153111. Our registered address is 42b Morfa Rd, Swansea, SA1 2EN, UK.

By creating an account, accessing the app, or using a feature of SUP Buddies, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not create an account or use the service.

2. What SUP Buddies provides

SUP Buddies helps paddleboarders find people with similar interests and experience, organise non-commercial paddleboard Trips between friends, and document some of the planning and participation information connected with those Trips.

SUP Buddies is a coordination and record-keeping service. It is not an outdoor activity provider, tour operator, booking agent, safety service, emergency service, instructor, coach, guide, lifeguard, or medical provider.

Trips are organised by users for themselves and their friends. SUP Buddies does not organise, lead, supervise, control, insure, or guarantee any Trip, route, location, participant, equipment, weather, water condition, or outcome.

3. Eligibility and your account

SUP Buddies is for adults aged 18 or over. You must provide accurate, current information and keep it updated when it affects your ability to use the service or participate safely.

You are responsible for your account, the activity carried out through it, and keeping your authentication details and devices secure. Authentication and account controls may be provided by a third-party identity provider; SUP Buddies does not need access to your password.

You must not create an account for another person, impersonate someone else, maintain multiple accounts to avoid a restriction, or allow another person to use your account.

4. Trip plans, scheduled Trips, and safety information

A Trip plan contains reusable information about a proposed route or location. A scheduled Trip is a dated instance of a plan with its own expected conditions, invitations, participants, and safety information.

When creating or using a Trip, the organiser and participants must review the information themselves and make their own decisions. The organiser is responsible for providing a reasonable and honest description of the Trip, checking its information before publishing it, and updating it when circumstances change.

A static hazard assessment is completed when the basic Trip plan and location are created. It is intended to record hazards likely to persist across multiple Trips on that route, using the available checklist and any additional description supplied by the organiser.

A dynamic hazard assessment is completed when a specific Trip is scheduled. It concerns the expected conditions for that date and time, including the checklist items and any additional hazards described by the organiser.

The app may calculate a required Experience Tier from the dynamic information entered by the organiser. This is a planning aid, not a certification, guarantee, professional assessment, or substitute for judgement. Conditions can change after information is entered and may differ from forecasts or from the information displayed in the app.

If a Trip is postponed, the organiser must make a new dynamic hazard assessment. Participants must review the updated information and decide whether they still have the ability, equipment, and willingness to take part. If the required tier changes, the app may identify participants who no longer meet the stated tier.

5. The Paddle Participation & Mutual Responsibility Agreement

Before accepting a place on a Trip, each participant must read and accept the then-current Paddle Participation & Mutual Responsibility Agreement, available at https://supbuddies.net/paddle-participation-agreement.html.

That agreement applies to the participant's decision to take part in the relevant Trip and explains the independent, non-commercial nature of the activity, personal capability and equipment responsibilities, and the fact that no organiser or fellow paddler is acting as a guide, coach, or instructor. Acceptance is recorded with the applicable agreement version.

These Terms govern your use of SUP Buddies and its services. The Paddle Participation & Mutual Responsibility Agreement governs the participant commitments it expressly covers. Nothing in either document removes rights or liabilities that cannot legally be excluded.

6. Your responsibility on and around the water

You are responsible for deciding whether a Trip is suitable for you and for stopping, changing, or withdrawing from it whenever you consider the conditions, route, equipment, other participants, or your own capability unsafe or unsuitable.

You are responsible for your own equipment, clothing, buoyancy aid or personal flotation device, leash where appropriate, transport, food, communications, insurance, and any permissions or access requirements. You should obtain appropriate training and independent professional advice for your circumstances.

Do not use SUP Buddies as a substitute for checking current local conditions, weather, water levels, tides, currents, access restrictions, official warnings, emergency arrangements, or your own health and fitness. Do not rely on the app for emergency response.

7. Information supplied by users

SUP Buddies accepts no responsibility for the completeness, accuracy, timeliness, or suitability of information submitted by a user and viewed, used, or relied upon by another user. You use user-supplied information at your own risk.

It is the responsibility of organisers and participants to check that static and dynamic hazard assessments, experience information, route details, contact details, and participation records are complete and accurate for the Trip. SUP Buddies does not verify that a user has the experience, qualifications, fitness, equipment, or identity they claim.

A map, distance, forecast, risk prompt, tier calculation, checklist, notification, or other app output may be incomplete, delayed, unavailable, or wrong. It is a prompt for human review, not a safety determination.

8. Community conduct and contact

You must treat other members respectfully and use contact details only for legitimate communication connected with the community or a Trip. You must not harass, threaten, stalk, discriminate against, deceive, or pressure another member, or use their information for spam, marketing, scraping, or unrelated contact.

You must not arrange commercial instruction, guiding, coaching, hire, or paid services through a Trip represented as a SUP Buddies non-commercial paddle. You must disclose any separate commercial arrangement and obtain any permissions required by law.

You are responsible for checking who you are meeting and for choosing appropriate public meeting arrangements. SUP Buddies cannot verify the identity, intentions, behaviour, ability, or safety of any member.

9. Content you submit

You keep ownership of photographs, descriptions, hazard information, ratings, reports, and other material you submit. You give SPO Investments Ltd a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce, adapt, display, and process that material only as reasonably needed to provide, secure, moderate, improve, and promote the service.

You confirm that you have the rights and permissions needed to submit the material and grant that licence, and that it does not unlawfully harm another person or infringe another person's rights.

Do not submit passwords, payment details, unnecessary medical information, or another person's personal information unless you are entitled to do so and the feature requires it. Please remember that information shared with other members may be copied or retained by them.

10. Trip records and completed Trips

SUP Buddies is designed to make reasonable efforts to preserve the information and snapshots associated with a completed Trip so that the record cannot ordinarily be edited by the organiser or participants after the scheduled date and meeting time has passed.

The organiser may correct an obvious administrative error or remove from the record a participant who accepted a place but did not participate, where the product provides that control. A participant who did not attend may be recorded as “Did not participate”.

You should use the app's Print to PDF facility, or another export available to you, if you need to retain your own copy of a completed Trip record. You must not rely on SUP Buddies retaining a record indefinitely or making it available at all times.

11. Prohibited use

You must not use SUP Buddies to:

• break the law, create an unreasonable risk to another person, or encourage unsafe or unlawful activity;
• upload malware or material that is abusive, hateful, sexually explicit, exploitative, defamatory, fraudulent, or infringes another person's rights;
• scrape, harvest, probe, reverse engineer, overload, interfere with, or bypass security or access controls of the service;
• misrepresent your identity, age, experience, qualifications, health, location, or intentions;
• use member information for advertising, recruitment, data brokerage, surveillance, or any purpose unrelated to the relevant community or Trip; or
• use the service in a way that could damage SUP Buddies, SPO Investments Ltd, its providers, or the safety and trust of the community.

12. Moderation, suspension, and account closure

We may review reports, remove or restrict content, decline invitations, limit features, suspend an account, or close an account where we reasonably believe this is needed to protect people, the community, the service, or our legal rights, or to enforce these Terms.

You may stop using the service and request account deletion through the available account controls. Closing an account does not automatically erase information that we are permitted or required to retain for safety records, reports, disputes, legal claims, legal obligations, security, or audit.

We are not required to preserve content that has been removed for safety, legal, or policy reasons. We may retain non-identifying or legally necessary records after closure.

13. Availability and third-party services

We aim to keep SUP Buddies useful and available, but we do not promise that it will be uninterrupted, error-free, secure, compatible with every device, or available in every location. We may change, suspend, or discontinue features, including third-party integrations, with or without notice where reasonably necessary.

The service may link to or depend on third-party services such as authentication, maps, geocoding, hosting, storage, notification delivery, or distance calculation. Those services are outside our control and may have their own terms, privacy notices, limitations, or outages.

14. Disclaimers and liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, SUP Buddies and SPO Investments Ltd provide the service and user-supplied information without a promise that a Trip will be safe, suitable, available, accurate, complete, successful, or free from loss, injury, damage, or interruption. You participate in paddleboarding and communicate or meet with other members at your own risk.

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, breach of statutory rights that cannot be excluded, or any other liability that cannot legally be excluded or limited.

Subject to the previous paragraph and applicable consumer law, we are not liable for losses caused by your decisions, the acts or omissions of another user, the conditions or conduct at a Trip, inaccurate or incomplete information, loss of connectivity, third-party services, or events outside our reasonable control.

If you are a consumer, nothing in these Terms affects rights you have under applicable consumer protection law, including the requirement that digital services be provided with reasonable care and skill where that requirement applies.

15. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms when the service, law, or our operating arrangements change. We will update the version and date shown on this page and take reasonable steps to draw attention to material changes. If a change requires fresh acceptance for a feature, we will ask you to accept it before you continue with that feature.

Your continued use of SUP Buddies after an update means the updated Terms apply to future use. The Terms and agreement version recorded for a completed acceptance remain identifiable from the relevant record.

16. Governing law and jurisdiction

These Terms and your use of SUP Buddies are governed by the law of England and Wales.

If you are a consumer, you may also have mandatory rights in the country where you live and may be entitled to bring proceedings in the courts of that country. Otherwise, the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction to resolve disputes arising from these Terms or the service.

17. Severability and general terms

If a court or competent authority decides that any provision of these Terms is unlawful, invalid, or unenforceable, that provision will be treated as modified or removed only to the minimum extent necessary, and the remaining provisions will continue in full effect.

These Terms, the Privacy Policy, and any feature-specific terms or agreements expressly incorporated into them form the agreement between you and SPO Investments Ltd about SUP Buddies. A failure to enforce a provision immediately is not a waiver of the right to enforce it later.

You may not transfer your rights or obligations under these Terms without our prior written consent. We may transfer our rights and obligations as part of a business reorganisation, sale, or transfer of the service, provided this does not reduce your legal protections.

18. Contact

Questions about these Terms can be sent to privacy@supbuddies.net.

SPO Investments Ltd 42b Morfa Rd Swansea, SA1 2EN UK