Vouchers and Gift Cards - The Pros and Cons

Most of us have either given or received gift cards or vouchers, in fact 47pc of gifts are now given as vouchers rather than presents or gifts. It is easier to give my grandchildren either cash or Amazon vouchers so they can buy what they want to. The advantage with cash is that they can spend it on anything. The disadvantage is having to ask for their bank details.

Amazon at least has the advantage of being valid for 10 years and anybody with an Amazon Prime account would definitely use them at some point. They are however only valid in the Amazon shop they were bought in eg Amazon UK, Amazon NL, Amazon FR. This does mean that I cannot buy Amazon vouchers for my daughter who lives in the Netherlands. Amazon vouchers are also non transferable so there is still the danger that the recipient does not have an Amazon account or that it ends up in a spam folder.?

Amazon has an unusually long expiry date but how many have expired vouchers lurking in kitchen drawers. I certainly do and during lockdown 98 million pounds worth of gift vouchers were wasted by people who simply could not use them. The biggest wastage was on experience and spa days as these did not open during lockdown and many companies refused to extend them.?

Gift cards are not always used as gifts. Very often they are used as tax free incentives or prizes. Prizes are far less likely to be used as the recipient may not like or use the product or experience and the recipient feels less guilty about not using it. Gifts are more likely to be targeted eg a certain perfume or an experience the recipient likes and the giver has more likely to have put some thought into this but this is not the case with the recipient of a prize. I myself won a ￡25 Rituals voucher which I never used as it had a very short expiry date and the code wouldn’t work. At that time the Dutch company did not have a UK help line.?

The main benefits to the retailer are that it brings more business into their store, whether that’s online or in a retail store. Most of these gift cards have a two year expiry date but not always so do check as some are much shorter than this. Some retailers make the vouchers almost impossible to use. When I worked for??Thomas Cook in a high street retail shop most of the vouchers were given to clients to book direct rather than through a shop so we couldnt accept them. Sometimes we could discount up to the value of the vouchers but more often we had to tell them to book direct with the call centre. Thomas Cook eventually went into liquidation leaving many customers with useless vouchers with no monetary value.??In theory they could join the list of creditors??but vouchers are the least likely to ever get the money back.?

When I was self employed as a travel consultant I bought a few ￡50 vouchers to give away as raffle prizes. I naively saw this as a way to attract a few more clients. In practice most of them were simply thrown in the bin and never used. This was an expensive learning curve so after that I had a letter which I used promising them ￡50 off any future booking of any value. They didn’t get used either but at least they didn’t cost me ￡50. One of my clients actually bought a ￡200 voucher as a very generous Christmas present but this was never used by the two year expiry date so although the figure of unused vouchers across the board is around 20pc in my own experience around 80 percent were unused so my own franchise had received this money with absolutely no benefit to myself as a franchisee.

I participated in the ONS Covid survey and received vouchers as a benefit. These proved really useful towards kitchen appliances and Christmas presents but I have had numerous issues trying to spend them. It is true that I have been unlucky but the issues have been due to spending more than one or two vouchers with the same retailer.?

I have had issues with two major retailers, one online and one in store. In both instances the systems were unable to cope with processing vouchers and crashed leaving me without the vouchers nor the goods until the vouchers fell back into the system and the pending funds went back into my bank. In both instances the customer service departments have proved useless leaving me to complain on twitter and wait 5-7 working days to resolve. Both retailers suggested I pay in cash and use the vouchers for something else which left me wondering if they do this on purpose to screw even more money out of the consumer. In both instances it has proved to be far from straightforward to make a purchase from them but they are huge retailers so why would they actually care??

Both retailers made it clear that accepting vouchers was a nuisance so although gift cards are an advertising boost for the respective retailers they don't actually want you to use them as they already have the money on the voucher.?

A staggering 47pc of consumers lose money of gift cards and vouchers. Either they are simply unused or there is no cash refund on the unused balance so the value to retailers particularly on e-vouchers is massive.?

Vouchers and gift cards both have their uses, the perfect gift for a busy person but do check the T&Cs before you buy. Will the recipient use them? Are they useful? What is the expiry date? What are the restrictions? Are they easy to use??