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U-GO Terms of Service (Draft Skeleton)

Draft — not legal advice, pending UAE counsel review

Drafting disclaimer — read before using this document for anything: This draft was prepared by an AI assistant. It is not legal advice, and the author is not a licensed attorney. U-GO's pilot market is the UAE (see GTM.md), so this draft must be reviewed by UAE-licensed counsel before publication — particularly the sections touching UAE consumer-protection law, UAE PDPL data-protection obligations, enforceability of the liability-limitation language in §7 and §12, and any EU-traveler GDPR exposure. Clauses marked [STANDARD CLAUSE — needs jurisdiction-specific counsel review] are generic boilerplate patterns, not vetted legal text. Clauses marked [NEEDS LOCAL COUNSEL: ...] flag a specific open question this draft deliberately does not guess at. Do not publish any version of this document until counsel has cleared it.

Scope note: this draft covers the guest-facing Terms of Service. A separate Hotel Partner Agreement (subscription terms, engagement-analytics data use, hotel obligations) is a distinct document, not covered here, and is not drafted in this pass. A standalone Privacy Policy (data subject rights, retention schedule, cross-border transfer basis) is also a natural companion document to this ToS and is recommended as a near-term follow-up rather than folding into §10 below in full.

Draft — not legal advice, pending UAE counsel review

Status update (2026-08-11) — guest reporting / hotel moderation review temporarily paused: The founder has temporarily hidden, at the UI level only, the guest-report flow (in apps/guest-pwa) and the hotel moderation queue / chat-transcript review flow (in apps/hotel-admin) — reason given: avoiding unnecessary exposure of guests' chat transcripts to hotel staff, and the ethical concern of staff reading private conversations, pending further review. The backend (apps/api/moderation/) is untouched and fully functional; this is a UI-level pause, not a feature removal, and it may be reactivated at any time without a product change. As of this date: a guest cannot currently file a report through the app, and hotel staff cannot currently view the moderation queue or a chat transcript through the app. Guest-to-guest Block is unaffected and remains fully live — a guest can still block another guest at any time, with the effect described in §5/§9 below. Sections §7.4, §8.2, §8.3, §9.3, §9.4, the §10 data table, and §14.2 below describe reporting/moderation as an active mechanism; that description is accurate to how the feature works when live, but is not currently operative as of 2026-08-11. It is preserved below (not deleted) so the contractual language is ready if/when the feature is reactivated. Do not read the present-tense phrasing in those sections as a current, exercisable guest right until this note is removed or updated.


1. Acceptance of these Terms

[STANDARD CLAUSE — needs jurisdiction-specific counsel review] By creating a U-GO account, scanning a hotel's QR code, or otherwise using the U-GO service (the "Service"), you agree to these Terms of Service ("Terms"). If you do not agree, do not use the Service. Standard mechanics of assent (clickwrap acceptance at registration, versioning, effective-date notice) should be finalized with counsel and are not specified in this draft.

2. What U-GO is

U-GO operates a discovery and coordination platform that helps hotel guests find and organize shared activities with other guests staying at the same hotel, and (where a guest has an active paid radius subscription) at nearby participating hotels. U-GO:

3. Eligibility & accounts

3.1 Age and capacity. [STANDARD CLAUSE — needs jurisdiction-specific counsel review] You must have the legal capacity to enter into these Terms in your jurisdiction of residence. [NEEDS LOCAL COUNSEL: minimum age requirement — UAE-applicable minimum age for entering a binding digital-services contract, and whether any UAE minor-protection rule requires an explicit age gate or parental-consent flow not currently built into the product.]

3.2 Account creation is independent of any hotel. You may register a U-GO account (email + one-time code, no password) before ever visiting a participating hotel — for example, after learning about U-GO on social media. A registered account with no hotel connection can view the public directory of participating hotels (name, city, connection status) but has no access to any hotel's activity feed, events, or chat until you either (a) physically scan that hotel's QR code on-site, or (b) hold an active paid radius subscription covering that hotel (§6).

3.3 One account per person. Accounts are personal and non-transferable. You are responsible for activity on your account and for keeping your login access (email inbox) secure.

3.4 Persistent profile. Your profile — including any business/professional information you choose to add — persists across stays and across hotels. It is not recreated per visit. You can edit or remove it at any time in account settings.

4. How hotel access works

4.1 QR-based access. Access to a specific hotel's guest community is granted by scanning that hotel's posted QR code while physically present at the hotel. This grants access for 10 days, after which you must re-scan the same physical QR code on-site to continue — a link, notification, or remote action does not extend or renew access.

4.2 Paid radius access. [STANDARD CLAUSE — needs jurisdiction-specific counsel review, esp. re: refund/cancellation rights] A separate paid subscription lets you discover and join events and chat at nearby participating hotels within your selected radius tier, without a QR scan at each one. This subscription is billed and managed the same way regardless of which hotels you access through it — see §6.

4.3 No identity or reservation verification. U-GO's hotel-access model relies on physical presence at a QR code, not on booking confirmation, hotel PMS integration, or government ID. You acknowledge this is a lighter-weight trust model than a fully verified guest list, and that both other guests and event organizers at a hotel may include paid-radius users who are not staying at that hotel.

4.4 Hotel directory. All registered accounts, including those with no hotel connection, can browse the list of hotels connected to U-GO (name, city/location, connection status). The directory does not expose any hotel's activity feed, event list, or chat, and does not display any hotel rating or engagement metric.

5. Acceptable use

You agree to use the Service in line with the U-GO Guest Conduct Guidelines (GUEST_CONDUCT_POLICY.md), incorporated into these Terms by reference. Without limiting that document, you agree not to:

6. Fees & payments

[STANDARD CLAUSE — needs jurisdiction-specific counsel review, esp. re: UAE consumer-protection rules on subscriptions/auto-renewal/refunds/cooling-off periods]

6.1 Guest use of a connected hotel's community (feed, events, chat) is always free once access is granted under §4.

6.2 The paid radius subscription and (when introduced post-pilot) any paid extended-business-profile view are billed through our payment processor, Stripe. Pricing, billing cycle, and cancellation mechanics will be presented at time of purchase.

6.3 All entitlement changes (subscription activation, renewal, expiry, cancellation) are driven solely by payment-processor webhook confirmation, not by any client-side signal — meaning a payment shown as "processing" in the app is not yet an active entitlement until confirmed.

6.4 [NEEDS LOCAL COUNSEL: refund and cooling-off rights applicable under UAE consumer-protection law for a digital subscription service, and whether/how these must be disclosed at point of sale.]

7. Guest-organized events; hotel and platform liability limitation

This section is central to how U-GO frames its role and is a primary candidate for counsel scrutiny.

7.1 U-GO is a discovery and coordination layer, not an event organizer. The overwhelming majority of events on the Service are created and run by guests themselves — U-GO provides the feed, the join mechanism, and the chat; it does not plan, staff, supervise, or guarantee the safety of any guest-created event. Hotel-official events (created by hotel staff, e.g., a hotel tennis tournament) are organized by the hotel, not by U-GO.

7.2 No safety or conduct guarantee. [STANDARD CLAUSE — needs jurisdiction-specific counsel review; enforceability of liability disclaimers/caps varies significantly by jurisdiction and by claim type, e.g. personal injury vs. property vs. purely financial loss, and may not be waivable at all under UAE consumer-protection or tort principles] U-GO does not guarantee the identity, intentions, or conduct of any guest, and is not a party to, does not supervise, and assumes no responsibility for what happens at any guest-organized or hotel-official event, including but not limited to disputes, injuries, property loss, or criminal conduct between guests. To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, U-GO's and its hotel partners' liability for guest-to-guest conduct at any event discovered or coordinated through the Service is limited as set out in this section and in §12.

7.3 Hotel's right to remove a disruptive guest. A participating hotel may, through its own staff, suspend or terminate ("ban") a guest's access to that hotel's community at any time, for any violation of these Terms, the Guest Conduct Guidelines, or the hotel's own on-property rules, with or without prior notice where circumstances warrant (e.g., an active safety concern). A hotel-initiated ban is scoped to that hotel only and does not affect the guest's U-GO account or access to any other hotel. This right to ban is independent of the reporting mechanism described in §8.2/§9.4 and is unaffected by the pause noted at the top of this document — a hotel may still ban a guest under this §7.3 for a violation it becomes aware of through any channel (e.g., an on-property complaint made directly to staff), it just cannot currently reach that awareness through an in-app guest report while reporting is paused.

7.4 Hotel is not U-GO's agent, and vice versa. [PAUSED as of 2026-08-11 — see top-of-document note. The "moderation decisions" and "rating-dispute resolutions" referenced below describe the mechanism as designed and as it operates once reactivated; while paused, hotel staff have no in-app moderation queue or rating-dispute report to resolve.] Hotels are independent businesses that pay to connect to U-GO's platform; hotel staff moderation decisions (including bans and rating-dispute resolutions, §9) are made by that hotel's own personnel, not by U-GO directly, and U-GO is not responsible for the outcome of a specific hotel's moderation decision. [NEEDS LOCAL COUNSEL: whether UAE law would nonetheless treat U-GO as jointly/vicariously responsible for a hotel's moderation acts or omissions in any circumstance, given U-GO both hosts the data and defines the moderation workflow the hotel uses.]

8. User content & ownership

8.1 You own what you create. You retain ownership of profile content, event content, and messages you post ("User Content"). By posting User Content, you grant U-GO a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to host, store, display, and transmit it as necessary to operate the Service (e.g., showing your event to other guests, delivering your chat messages, showing your conduct-rating aggregate to a prospective event participant per §9).

8.2 Moderation visibility. [PAUSED as of 2026-08-11 — see top-of-document note. Reporting is currently unavailable in the app, so this clause is not presently exercisable; it describes the disclosure that will apply again once reporting is reactivated, and is kept here so the underlying data-handling commitment is not lost.] You acknowledge and agree that if any guest reports a chat message, event, or another guest, the relevant hotel's staff will be shown the full chat transcript of that event, not only the specific flagged message — this is a designed feature of the moderation workflow (see also GUEST_CONDUCT_POLICY.md §3), not an incidental side effect, and applies regardless of whether your own message was the one flagged.

8.3 Removal. [Note: while reporting is paused (see top-of-document note), the "absent a report" condition below is presently the only condition — i.e., U-GO does not proactively review private messages or event chat content at all right now, since the report-triggered path described in §8.2 is not currently reachable.] U-GO or hotel staff may remove User Content that violates these Terms or the Guest Conduct Guidelines. U-GO does not proactively review private messages or event chat content absent a report or an automated spam/profanity flag (§5 of GUEST_CONDUCT_POLICY.md).

9. Guest conduct ratings (GuestConductRating)

9.1 What it is. After a shared event has occurred, a guest who participated in it may rate how another participating guest behaved at that event. This is a behavior rating tied to a specific event, not a general reputation, personality, or identity score.

9.2 Visibility. Once a guest has received a minimum threshold number of ratings, an aggregate score is shown to other guests considering joining that guest's event — visible before the deciding guest joins, in keeping with the feature's self-policing purpose. Below that threshold, no numeric score is shown.

9.3 No automatic consequence. [Updated 2026-08-11 — see top-of-document note: the reporting mechanism referenced below is currently paused.] A rating, however low, does not automatically restrict a guest's ability to create or join events, and does not automatically route a guest into any moderation queue. As designed, any actual enforcement (message removal, block, hotel ban) occurs only through the reporting mechanism described in §5 and GUEST_CONDUCT_POLICY.md, never as an automatic effect of a rating. While reporting is paused, the only enforcement mechanism a guest can presently exercise themselves is Block (§5/GUEST_CONDUCT_POLICY.md §4); a hotel may still ban a guest under §7.3 based on awareness gained outside the app (e.g., an on-property complaint), but message removal or a report-triggered ban cannot presently be initiated through an in-app report.

9.4 Disputing a rating. [PAUSED as of 2026-08-11 — see top-of-document note. This dispute path is reached through the same reporting mechanism as §8.2/§9.3, which is currently unavailable in the app.] A guest may report a rating they believe is unfair, retaliatory, or discriminatory, using the same reporting mechanism used for messages and guests. Such a report is reviewed and resolved by a moderator employed by the hotel at which the underlying event took place — not by a separate, centralized U-GO adjudication body — and that moderator is required to record a written rationale before resolving the report. You acknowledge that this means a rating visible platform-wide is, when disputed, adjudicated at the level of a single hotel's own moderation staff. Until reporting is reactivated, a guest who believes a rating is unfair or retaliatory does not have an in-app dispute path — contact support@u-go.ae in the interim if this affects you.

9.5 Reveal delay. To reduce the risk of retaliatory rating, a rating is not shown to the guest it concerns until either both participants in the pair have rated each other, or a fixed waiting period (on the order of two weeks from the event) has elapsed.

10. Data collected and why (summary — see forthcoming Privacy Policy for full detail)

[STANDARD CLAUSE — needs jurisdiction-specific counsel review] This section summarizes categories of data U-GO collects and the reason for each; it is not a substitute for a full Privacy Policy, which should be drafted as a companion document before launch.

CategoryExamplesWhy collected
Account/identityEmail addressLogin (one-time-code, no password); the sole account identifier
ProfileDisplay name, avatar, bio, business title/company/skillsPowers your profile and the optional business-networking use case
Hotel membershipWhich hotels you've QR-verified or radius-accessed, verification timestampsEnforces the 10-day re-verification rule and per-hotel access/ban logic
Event & chat contentEvents created/joined, chat messages, direct messagesCore product function; retained so moderation can review full context on a report (§8.2)
Conduct ratingsRatings given/received, event associationPowers the guest conduct-rating feature (§9)
Reports & moderation [PAUSED as of 2026-08-11 — see top-of-document note: no new Report rows are currently created via the app's UI; existing Report records and the underlying database/backend remain intact and unchanged.]Report contents, resolution notes, ban recordsTrust & safety enforcement, audit trail
PaymentSubscription status (via Stripe; U-GO does not store card numbers)Billing for paid radius access
Referral/pointsReferral code used or shared, points balance and history, attribution dataPowers the referral/points growth program; kept as a permanent, append-only ledger for accounting/anti-abuse purposes while your account exists — see §14.2, this ledger is deleted along with everything else if you permanently delete your account
Device/technicalBasic technical logsService operation, security, abuse prevention

[NEEDS LOCAL COUNSEL: exact data-retention periods per category (especially chat content, report/moderation records, and conduct-rating data) required or permitted under UAE PDPL; lawful basis for processing under UAE PDPL and, for any EU-resident guests, GDPR; cross-border transfer basis given hosting is on Vercel/Railway/Stripe/Postmark/Cloudflare infrastructure not necessarily UAE-based; and whether a UAE data-protection officer or registration requirement applies to U-GO at pilot scale.]

11. Third-party processors

U-GO uses the following categories of third-party service providers to operate the Service: payment processing (Stripe), transactional email delivery for login codes (Postmark), and object storage for avatars/hotel logos/QR images (Cloudflare R2). [STANDARD CLAUSE — needs jurisdiction-specific counsel review] A full sub-processor list and each provider's own data-handling terms should be referenced in the companion Privacy Policy, along with the legal basis for any resulting cross-border data transfer.

12. Disclaimers & limitation of liability

[STANDARD CLAUSE — needs jurisdiction-specific counsel review; general disclaimer/cap boilerplate below is illustrative only and must not be treated as enforceable text until reviewed]

THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE." TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, U-GO DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, AND U-GO'S TOTAL LIABILITY ARISING OUT OF OR RELATED TO THESE TERMS OR THE SERVICE SHALL NOT EXCEED THE AMOUNT YOU PAID U-GO IN THE TWELVE MONTHS PRECEDING THE CLAIM, OR (IF YOU HAVE PAID NOTHING) A NOMINAL AMOUNT TO BE SET WITH COUNSEL. [NEEDS LOCAL COUNSEL: whether UAE law permits this style of liability cap for a consumer-facing service, whether personal-injury or safety-related claims can be capped or excluded at all, and whether a different formulation is required for enforceability.]

13. Indemnification

[STANDARD CLAUSE — needs jurisdiction-specific counsel review] You agree to indemnify and hold U-GO harmless from claims arising out of your breach of these Terms or your misuse of the Service, to the extent permitted by applicable law.

14. Account deletion & termination

14.1 You can permanently delete your account at any time — this cannot be undone. From account settings, you can request deletion of your U-GO account. This is not a "deactivation," "pause," or "suspend" state, and there is no reversible or reactivatable version of it anywhere in the product: once you confirm, the deletion is immediate and permanent, and there is no way — by you, by U-GO staff, or otherwise — to bring the account or its content back. If you think you might want to use U-GO again later, do not use this action; there is no "temporarily step away" option today.

14.2 What is deleted. [Note (2026-08-11): "any reports or moderation records tied specifically to your account" below refers to existing Report/moderation database records, which continue to exist and to be deleted on account deletion exactly as described, even while the in-app reporting UI is paused per the top-of-document note — this clause is unaffected by the pause.] Deleting your account removes your profile, your business-profile fields, your hotel-membership/QR-verification history, the chat and direct messages you authored, your event participation, the conduct ratings you gave or received, the guest-to-guest blocks you made, your referral/points ledger history (points awarded, referral attributions, redemptions — even though that ledger is treated as a permanent, append-only accounting/anti-abuse record while your account is active, per §10's data table, it does not survive a full account deletion), and any reports or moderation records tied specifically to your account. This is a genuine, irreversible removal of your account and everything tied to it — there is no category held back.

14.3 U-GO may suspend or terminate your account platform-wide for violation of these Terms, the Guest Conduct Guidelines, or applicable law.

14.4 A hotel may ban you from that hotel's community only (§7.3); this does not by itself terminate your U-GO account or your access to any other hotel.

14.5 Sections reasonably intended to survive termination (e.g., §7, §8.2, §12, §13) survive.

15. Governing law & dispute resolution

[NEEDS LOCAL COUNSEL: governing law and dispute-resolution forum for the pilot market — likely UAE federal law and/or a specific emirate/free-zone framework depending on where U-GO is legally established; whether arbitration, onshore UAE courts, or a free-zone court (e.g., DIFC) is the intended forum; consumer-protection rules that may override a chosen forum for UAE-resident guests regardless of contractual choice.]

[STANDARD CLAUSE — needs jurisdiction-specific counsel review] Placeholder pending the above: These Terms are governed by the laws of __________, without regard to conflict-of-law principles. Any dispute shall be resolved in __________.

16. Changes to these Terms

[STANDARD CLAUSE — needs jurisdiction-specific counsel review] U-GO may update these Terms from time to time. Material changes will be notified in-app (per the current in-app-only notification model — no push/email/SMS notification channel exists at MVP). Continued use after an update constitutes acceptance.

17. Contact

[STANDARD CLAUSE — needs jurisdiction-specific counsel review] Placeholder for U-GO's legal entity name, registered address, and contact channel — to be finalized alongside the UAE entity-formation decision.


Where and how these Terms are surfaced in the product (registration-flow acceptance checkbox, footer link, in-app settings) is a design/frontend decision, not made in this document.