Moonpig & Red Letter Days, Awful

Guss

Okay so I was gifted a £150 voucher for a one night stay with dinner for two for my birthday. I followed the link on the voucher to the Red Letter Days website and entered my voucher no. & PIN plus email and managed to get onto the RLD site, so far so good.

So now I had a choice either continue with the above or chose a different experience. So initially I chose the default experience. The available selection of hotels wasn't great but regardless when I clicked on what was being offered for each hotel I was presented with a blank loading page... which never loaded and I tried several hotels so in the end gave up. Choosing a different browser didn't help. Eventually this problem was sorted and I now seem to be able to get access and no longer see the screen below.



So on to option two and selecting a difference experience and you are presented with meals for two, spa treatments, go-karting, safari, Hawkstone brewery etc and lots of other experiences. Here at least when clicking on the experiences I could get into them and go as far as putting them in my basket. But the problem was no information was being given as to how much of my £150 would be used up by the selected experience. So for example picking a meal for two can't possibly cost £150. So I thought lets them since I couldn't find an answer in the Support/FAQ pages. 



I was assured this would be sorted out and I would be able to see how much the experience was costing and what the balance was. A week later nothing has changed! 

Does anyone else have experience of the Red Letter Days site?

flaneurs_lobster

So someone has given you a gift voucher for £150.

In order to spend the voucher you have to go online and then choose which gift voucher you want to purchase using the original gift voucher. That's not working properly.

No doubt when you want to spend the second gift voucher you will have to go online or present it at point of sale, in order to convert it back to a cash value. Let's hope that bit works.

Be honest, would you have been offended if the gifter had just given you £150 cash?

Woodstok2000

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81865417#Comment_81865417

It's not quite that complicated, although cash would still be preferable. As I understand it:

OP has been given a voucher for a specific experience. They can go online and book that experience using the voucher.

The voucher can also be used for Its cash value against other experiences on the site (same process).

The problem is, when booking an alternate experience, no prices are shown so you can't tell if you'll be getting a partial credit back or have to pay an extra fee....

@Guss As a workaround, can you view the site logged out in another browser to get the prices?

Guss

@flaneurs_lobster No not at all would have preferred the cash.

@Woodstok2000 No you have to log into Red Letter Days using credentials supplied by the gift voucher. I will tackle them over the weekend once again and update. It shouldn't be this difficult

Thanks for the replies.

Woodstok2000

I just had a look and all the experiences had prices listed...

Guss

How strange I don't see this when logged in. I will try again tomorrow and will search for the above experiences and see what comes up for me. When I checked yesterday I wasn't getting this!

Woodstok2000

I wasn't logged in, not sure if that matters...

Guss

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81867477#Comment_81867477

So if I don't log in and go to Red Letter Days I see the cost of the experience like @Woodstok2000. If I log in the cost is hidden and I've no idea what they are going to charge me or whether I will have a credit balance or it will get gobbled up. Frustratingly neither did the Help Hub FAQ confirm this. If it did it's well and truly hidden. Lets say I pick the Hawkstone Brewery experience as an example.

then add it to my basket

Can anyone see a price or confirmation of what credit balance I will have left?

The chat agent I contact (in South Africa, seems to be the new capital of chat support) said this lack of pricing will sometimes happen. Well I've logged in now dozens of times over a period of 3 weeks and it's never worked. I had a look at the help hub below and yes you guessed it no answers were forthcoming..

Incidentally when I clicked on a "Contact Us" link the following page came up. Can anyone spot an actual phone number, email address even a chat bot or chat agent on the page? They simply do not want you to contact them!

The agent I spoke to (Busisiwe) acknowledged she was employed directly by Red Letter Days and Buyagift. You could tell agents are keen to get the contact over with as I'm sure they are under pressure to complete so many calls per day. She took my phone number and said a manager will be getting in contact. I also asked for a complaints email address and was given:

https://help.buyagift.co.uk/hc/en-us/requests/new

Moonpig seems to own Red Letter Day and possibly Buyagift. My voucher was bought for me through Moonpig so I thought I'd contact them directly and put in a complaint. I found Moonpig's 'Contact Us' page and it's anything but. It's once again a self help hub with no way of forwarding a complaint.

Googled Moonpig's complaints email address and this came up: https://help.moonpig.com/en/articles/318764-contact-customer-service

None of the links work!! Yes it's probably a redundant page but it goes to show how little customer service is a consideration and why you're hit with a wall of pseudo support.

My advice to anyone thinking of using Moonpig/Red Letter Day is don't because if anything goes wrong you will be frustrated and they are simply not setup to provide customer service. The support agents who are abroad have limited information and just pass on what they've been told. The fact I can't see what I'm spending when I log in is beyond stupidity.

Guss

Looks like I'm not alone just spotted this on reddit about Red Letter Days and Buyagift and it reveals pretty appalling customer service…

https://www.reddit.com/r/CasualUK/comments/1arc6av/whats_the_deal_with_red_letter_days_holidays/

Guss

Okay so here is the latest. Moonpig have replied and they stated they couldn't find a recent order under my email address. In my support request I made with them I had linked to this thread as It's got screenshots and details of what's happened. If they'd bothered to take a couple of minutes to read this thread they would see I hadn't ordered anything yet simply because their site fails to provide a price for an experience or what your balance will be after you've purchased. I'm worried if I purchase anything my credit will disappear and I'm back to square one.

BuyaGift replied and in the end have asked me to raise a complaint via the same web page I used to raised a complaint with them in the first place.

Moonpig and BuyaGift closed the complaints quickly and didn't give me a chance to reply.

Oh and the chat agent I spoke with in the South African call centre who said a manager would call be back. Well still waiting for that callback a week later!