Case No. IP-2018-000134

67.The information in issue was identified in paragraph 7 of the Re-Amended Particulars of Claim. I will call this the ‘Client Information’. “In the course of its business Trailfinders maintains records of information relating to its clients including: (1)Clients’ names, nationalities and dates of birth, passport numbers and frequent flyer numbers. (2)Clients’ contact details, including home addresses, telephone numbers and email addresses. (3)Details of trips that clients have booked with Trailfinders, including provisional bookings and past bookings. Such details include itineraries, hotel bookings, flight details and prices. (4)Booking reference numbers which are assigned to clients’ bookings and used by clients to access Viewtrail as set out below. (5)Details of clients’ typical budgets, interests, preferences and special requirements. (6)Information relating to the time of year clients’ tend to book trips and significant dates such as honeymoons and anniversaries.” 68.‘Viewtrail’, referred to in paragraph 7(4), is an online portal used by Trailfinders. Once a customer has booked a trip, they may access Viewtrail on Trailfinders’ website which records their booking details. Until a change made after this dispute started, customers could do this using their surname and a unique reference assigned to their booking, with which they had been provided. 69.As appears from the authorities discussed above, the Client Information is highly characteristic of information long regarded by the courts as capable of being confidential and thus liable to be subject both to an implied term of confidence in a contract of employment and to an equitable obligation of confidence. 70.The Client Information was stored on a Trailfinders’ system to which only Trailfinders’ employees had access, using an ID and alphanumeric password allotted to each employee. Some of the information could also be accessed by clients via Viewtrail, but each client could view only data relating to themselves. 71.Mr Simpson described the Client Information as ‘the lifeblood of the business’ Mr Byrne confirmed that information of the type in issue would be valuable to any travel business and that in so far as it applied to TCL’s customers, TCL regarded it as being confidential. Mr La Gette confirmed that the Client Information contained confidential information and he accepted that parts of it were on their own confidential. 72.I have no doubt and I find that the Client Information was confidential to Trailfinders. It has the characteristics set out in art.2(1) of Directive 2016/943. It falls within Goulding J’s class 2 of confidential information held by an employer. 73.There was a suggestion by the defendants that the Client Information could not be the subject of an action for breach of confidence because it had not been sufficiently protected from public disclosure by Trailfinders. I reject that. The protection may not have been as rigorous as it should have been but Trailfinders clearly took steps to ensure that the Client Information was not openly available to anyone by requiring the use of a password or, in the case of Viewtrail, limiting access to information to clients only if their name and booking reference was known. 74.By way of a related argument, it was said that Trailfinders’ employees were not sufficiently informed of the confidential nature of the Client Information such that they could be liable for its use or disclosure without Trailfinders’ permission. I also reject that argument. Mr La Gette accepted that he knew that a lot of the information forming the Client Information was confidential. He thought that some of it was not because it could be obtained from public sources. That is a separate matter which I discuss below. Mr Bishop held a similar view.