Laithwaites wine deal - Living Social, avoid

cloughjo

Bought this for Christmas paid £49 for 12 bottles of the Christmas Mix with £1 delivery charge. The deal sold out immediately and the £49 I spent was used as cash against an expensive alternative case. I also had to pay £8 delivery. I called Customer Service to try to resolve this and was put through to a Customer Complaints Answering Service! Needless to say they didn't call back!

There is a current deal being advertised on Living Social please save your money and avoid!

dollydiva

I didn't buy any sort of deal via LS from Laithwaites, but had received a money off voucher over the Christmas from Amazon.

I bought the Premium Christmas case - with the voucher, I paid £120 odd quid, so not to be sniffed at.

The wines were awful. No, ONE was 'ok' which was the Chateauneuf du pape - I'm not a great fan of that wine, but at least you could actually drink it as compared to the rest which the kitchen sink enjoyed.

After 3 bottles had gone down the sink, I called customer service - hey! it says if your not happy call us - I told him I wasn't happy. He was all sorry and I'll send you 6 bottles of the Chateauneuf. Then within less than 2 minutes he emailed me to say that was 'sold out' - except that was a big fat lie as it wasn't sold out on the site. He then told me he was sending me 6 bottles of one of the others I'd mentioned as being 'just drinkable'.

Call me a cynic, but it's my belief he looked at the price of the Chateauneuf and thought 'oh no, lets send her a cheap bottle @£6.99) - hardly a substitute is it for the £120+ pounds I spent is it?

Suffice to say, the 6 bottles of cheap plonk arrived and they are parked under the sink where no doubt they will stay.

btw, been with Virgin Wines for 8 years and their wines are excellent.

mandragora_2

Thanks for this - we'd just been looking at a deal offer and seriously considering it, despite usually avoiding 'schemes' like this for the very reasons you've mentioned. Will have to resort to just bringing a bit more home with us from France when we're over in the next couple of weeks. No real hardship there!

gooneybird

Beware of dealing with Laithwaites - who also own Sunday Times Wine Club, Telegraph Wine, Averys etc etc. I have Power of Attorney for a chap in his 90's who has had awful trouble with Laithwaites and Sunday Times Wine Club. They send wine he doesn't want and hasn't asked for, they don't supply invoices, they have access his Bank account in a cavalier fashion taking money out when they may not have delivered wine, put money back in when they think they've made an error. They don't reply to emails,nor do they reply to letters. You phone and they say the person you want isn't there and you have to deal with somebody elso who doesn't know about your problems. The are reluctant to cancel your accounts with them and even send wine after you have managed to cancel your account. The boss is Tony Laithwaite, but you cannot email or write to him and the CEO is Simon McMurtrie and if you look online at Company CEO's you can find Tesco, BT, Virgin etc but NOT Laithwaite's. They seem only to be contactable by phone or email if you are placing an order. Their wine might be o.k.but it IS expensive and you can get just as good or even better wine at Supermarket and then you don't have to pay nearly £7 - £9 for delivery. My advice to anyone is DON'T HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH LAITHWAITES WINE - the're NOT interested in YOU the customer - they JUST WANT YOUR MONEY

stupormundis

I had a £ 50 discount voucher for cases over £ 102.88 .. firstly the webling /introoffer was broken and so I selected a more expensive case, applied the discount case and got a £ 25.50 reduction. This is simply blatantly dishonest marketing .. avoid at all costs ..