Red Letter Days

mikee52

I had a voucher for a 'luxury weekend break for two' which when I originally searched, lots of good hotels came up as options. However, time went by (including the pandemic) and I extended my voucher 4 times. When looking for a break now, only B&B's and dodgy dirty looking hotels crop up. One hotel only charges £30 per night (I called them) and yet when trying to use my £139 voucher, I have to pay the 'shortfall' of £31 to book in! This means the voucher is worthless! Several other choices are similar, having to pay an extra £200 to book! I have tried to contact customer services and spoke on their online chat service who said they would upgrade my voucher as I have paid to extend it several times. This was supposed to happen within 30mins. Days have gone by and I can no longer contact them at all by phone or chat. My original voucher now has an invalid code so that I can no longer log in. It seems I have been blocked from accessing anything? I cannot even inform them that my voucher code is no longer active and now feel that they have not given me the offer as advertised as per my complaint to them, which wasn't even answered or addressed.

Aylesbury_Duck

mikee52 said:

I had a voucher for a 'luxury weekend break for two' which when I originally searched, lots of good hotels came up as options. However, time went by (including the pandemic) and I extended my voucher 4 times. When looking for a break now, only B&B's and dodgy dirty looking hotels crop up. One hotel only charges £30 per night (I called them) and yet when trying to use my £139 voucher, I have to pay the 'shortfall' of £31 to book in! This means the voucher is worthless! Several other choices are similar, having to pay an extra £200 to book! I have tried to contact customer services and spoke on their online chat service who said they would upgrade my voucher as I have paid to extend it several times. This was supposed to happen within 30mins. Days have gone by and I can no longer contact them at all by phone or chat. My original voucher now has an invalid code so that I can no longer log in. It seems I have been blocked from accessing anything? I cannot even inform them that my voucher code is no longer active and now feel that they have not given me the offer as advertised as per my complaint to them, which wasn't even answered or addressed.

First, and most important question:  Who bought the voucher?  It's the purchaser that has consumer rights.  If that's you, then that's good. 

Why has it taken so long to get round to using it?  "including the pandemic" suggests this may be up to or more than five years old.  The available offers changing over that time is not unreasonable.  Nor is the concept of making up the value of the voucher if that's part of the terms and conditions of the voucher, but as per my first question, you may not actually be the contract-holder here, so may have limited routes to getting a resolution.

The voucher isn't "worthless".  You can still get a break using it and therefore it has value.  If it is circa five years old, it has of course lost value, but that sounds like it's a situation of your making rather than anything else.  Just taking inflation into account, it's perhaps lost something like a quarter of its purchasing power over the last five years.

If you were the original purchaser, how much was the voucher and how did you pay?

Mark_d

I was given a voucher like that at my 15th wedding anniversary.  When we tried to use the voucher, it could only be redeemed against an unusually high priced rate at a very poor selection of hotels.  We just let the voucher go unused.  It's a shame...but I'm no fan of vouchers.

We now maintain an online giftlist so people can look there and "promise" an item, if they can't think of anything else we want.