Alton towers with buyagift - AVOID!

[quiddity]

Well trying to book with buyagift has been awkward!

Back in March we got their £74 voucher for 2 alton towers tickets (paid about £60 with a discount code). Not long after alton towers said they were going to a dynamic pricing (aka we'll charge even more when we think we can get away with it!).
Didn't hear anything from buyagift about it so thought all was OK.
Come may I had a look at booking tickets only to find that it was no longer available. What was available were the same 2 tickets for £74 but now it has as dated march-October rather than a full year.
Contacted customer support who said I'd have to buy the new one, but at full price. After days of emailing they finally honoured it (even though 4 months were lost) but that is when I found I could only book week days, which was mentioned no where on the website. The only difference was having to pay more for special events, like halloween. We wouldn't have gone at weekend so didn't bother us.

we finally decided to go next Friday so went to book it & it wanted an upgrade charge of £7.25! This applied to all days in July, August & every weekend in September.
Contacted customer service via Live chat & they just kept repeating that it needs paying. So for half an hour I kept repeating for them to show me where it says there's extra fees to pay & what they would do about the websites false advertising... They finally gave in & said I'd get refunded!

After many years of using buyagift for all sorts, this has been the last straw. Won't be using them again.
If I had paid for the voucher without a discount code then it would've been cheaper to book with alton towers directly!

[TheHughesCrew]

I used buyagift for a theatre package... the tickets available were considerably cheaper to purchase directly from the theatre. I did contact customer service and they gave me £20 goodwill but that didn't even cover the price difference. I've had some brilliant experiences with them too (the cocktail making in particular was fabulous) but it's really annoying not being able to actually SPEAK to someone if/ when it goes wrong

[quiddity]

Originally Posted by TheHughesCrew

I used buyagift for a theatre package... the tickets available were considerably cheaper to purchase directly from the theatre. I did contact customer service and they gave me £20 goodwill but that didn't even cover the price difference. I've had some brilliant experiences with them too (the cocktail making in particular was fabulous) but it's really annoying not being able to actually SPEAK to someone if/ when it goes wrong

See more...

That's the issue I had. Live chat is with someone who's first language isn't English so it's a bit broken up & have to repeat yourself. When it gets transfered to email it's better but with this issue they just haven't responded for 4 days.

We used to us the 2 nights away deal all the time! Especially as DW works shifts so had We-Fri off every 2 weeks. The problem with this was that the hotels we loved staying in started coming off the deal, others only had 1 or 2 rooms allocated for buyagift & now you can't even see what hotels are included without buying the voucher first.

For our get aways now we most likely will got for have hideaways. £49 for 4 nights is a steal! LOL

[Tigsteroonie]

I bought tickets for Thorpe Park thru Buy-a-gift at the back end of last year when they were on offer. Serves me right, I didn't read the small print that they were only worth the "2023 prices" and so had to pay a supplement to use them in 2024.

Weirdly though I used the same offer with Buy-a-gift to buy tickets for Legoland and didn't have to pay a supplement on those. [All BAG offers bought at same time, all used within same week in May.]

[quiddity]

Well after my lengthy live chat with them on Sunday they have now updated their website to say that you will need to pay extra in peak season.

Peak season for buyagift however is all of July, August & weekends thereafter.

Directly form alton towers it's £58-£78 for 2 tickets, that's a saving of £3.25-£23.25 over buyagift! Shocking!

[PoohBears#1fan]

The problem with BAG is that they sell you an experience, yet when you go to book it, what you actually have is a financial credit.

My DS has bought us a couple of 'experiences' from them, and it always ends up costing us more, plus a ton of time on their website, awful concept.