Voucher companies like RedLetterDays and Buyagift

UselessWebsite

Experience Gift Voucher Shoppers beware.

If you are thinking of buying an experience gift voucher for yourself or for a gift, please be very careful when choosing and using Red Letter Days.

Red Letter Days used to be a great company to deal with, particularly if there were any queries, but that doesn't seem to be the case any more.

I attempted to redeem a voucher that had already been extended, as it was impossible to redeem when first purchased. I needed to extend and modify the voucher more than once previously, and in the past this was extremely straightforward, requiring a simple phone call. This is not the case any more.

Upon entering the voucher details on the website, the system could not find the voucher, so I looked for a way to contact the company. There are no contact details available on the website, and after searching the website and the internet I found two telephone numbers. However, one of the two phone numbers I found was no longer available, despite still being shown on the website, and the other phone number played a pre-recorded message that the office was currently closed, and was open from 9 till 5, Monday to Friday.

I rang at 1 PM on a Monday!

It is also impossible to register an enquiry from the website or send an email to customer service, as there are no contact links or email addresses on the website. Searching the Help section for contact information directed me to use the LiveChat service, but there is no link to LiveChat available on the website. Instead there is an automated bot which just provides links to pages that I had already looked at but which were of no help. Using an email address I found on a well known review website, I sent a message requesting directions on how to get some help with my query, and I had a response. Sadly, the email response once again directed me to use LiveChat, and included a picture of a link, but the link doesn't exist on the website, so back to square one.

After searching for any way to get a message to Red Letter Days, I resorted to sending a Facebook message via the Red letter Days Facebook page.

After 5 hours of trying several avenues (yes, really) I eventually had a response to my Facebook message, and finally I had a solution to my query, for which I am very grateful.

I am computer literate and able to make use of the internet fairly well, but it was still a struggle for me. I dread to think how anybody with less computer experience would manage.

So, as I stated at the beginning, please be very careful when choosing and using Red Letter Days, particularly if you need to use customer service.