Haymarket Magazines £40 Virgin Wine Discount

lolarentt

If you subscribe to one of the dozens of Haymarket Group magazines beware of this offer, it's not what it seems!

I received a letter advising an increase in the quarterly charge I pay for 'Formula 1' magazine, and included with this was a voucher "..as a thank you for subscribing we would like to reward you with this £40 WineBank voucher.
Enjoy!

To claim it said logon to virginwines.com site or phone (0870 number of course!) - enter the code and password from the voucher - "and you have just saved £40". You can then choose your own case of wine, or select the exclusive case offer pictured, with an extra £20 off making £60 saving on a case worth £100.

Well this sounded too good to miss so I logged on and went through the Virgin Wine registration and had my a/c credited with the £40. Sure enough there was the 'exclusive case' offer but the extra discount was £10, not the £20 the voucher had offered. Undaunted I carried on to buy the case BUT then realised (before providing any debit or credit card numbers luckily) what you are doing here is signing up to a regular payment scheme!! The 'WineBank' works like a bank, you pay in regular sums and they send you wine when your account has enough cash in it - all the usual 'you can reject any cases you don't want etc' apply but it's not what it appeared to be from the voucher.

£40 off a case would have been fine, but a long term commitment to ongoing payments to Virgin Wine? No thank you!

dinglebert

There is no long term requirment as you can cancel immediately with no problem. Agreed it should be clearer that this is regular payment account, but cancelling is no problem and you can get your money back. I was a member for a while when I too got the £40 voucher but then for every £40 I put in they put in £20. Was a good deal at the time until I had too much wine.

lolarentt

dinglebert wrote: »

There is no long term requirment as you can cancel immediately with no problem. Agreed it should be clearer that this is regular payment account, but cancelling is no problem and you can get your money back. .

That's not really the point, I know you can cancel but that puts the onus on the customer to stop the arrangement. The intro voucher should make it clear that you are actually being asked to join something to get the £40 discount whereas it implies it's a 'no strings' straight discount which is not so.

I've nothing against Virgin Wine as a supplier, I bought from them for a long while until they stopped the buy when you want arrangement and tried to move to a regular quarterly order, unless you stop it, when I opted out. I always found them fine to deal with, it's just the sneaky way this 'deal' is promoted that annoys me.