I had never heard of Red Letter Days before, but it sounds as though they are difficult to deal with. I hope that you get things worked out. It would be nice to have a day at the spa to celebrate your anniversary.

Zorbing certainly seems interesting. I can’t help but think of hamsters when I look at that picture on the site though! :o)

The voucher had NOT expired, and should therefore have been honoured as-is. I would not have complained, had it been past the expiry date of the voucher. A company that offers special days should make customers feel special, rather than feel like an immense chore every time they call, including the first time they try to book. Their behaviour was already unacceptable even before the “extra fee” event.

You see, some people happen to have very busy lives, and spending money to go to London for 45 minutes wasn’t in the cards before summer.

And I certainly didn’t need to moan in the slightest when I called the spa directly. They were wonderfully polite and chirpy, unless the call centre drones from Red Letter Days, and without me even needing to give an excuse, they offered me an ideal weekend slot for a time that was more suitable.

Being ready to bring up problems in a diplomatic manner rather than lethargically ignoring them tends to pay off much better. It helps customers be satisfied, and it helps the company evaluate where they’ve gone wrong.

As for your lame attempts at offending me, if that’s what they are, hmm better luck next time, chump.

I am in the midst of attempting to book my red letter day driving experience but have all but given up with this company. I have spent over an hour on hold in total without getting through, and was once disconnected from the phone queue after 10 minutes for no aparent reason. I emailed them three weeks ago, including my reference number, and they still haven’t responded to that either. As somebody rightly pointed out, it should be a special experience rather than an expensive and inconvenient hassle to even communicate with these people.

They are going out of business – in real financial triuble

Well I work for Red Letter Days and totally understand when people call up and need to book,re-book,extend,or just buy a voucher. What I don’t understand is even when people have been waiting for 4 minutes they still come on with an attitude of a 16 year old who has just been dumped and expect me to assume a McDonalds HAPPY mentality even when they haven’t bothered to pick up the phone once to book their experience or even register it in their own name! So many dumbos call that it is hard to be smiley phone guy for 8 hours a day! I have dealt with so many people like you who have no respect for any sort of human error or terms and conditions and then MOAN and MOAN!!!! The fact that you expected to just cancel wily nilly at the drop of a hat is so laughable! Have you ever booked anything else in your life? And as for your wonderful Elemis Spa in London… They are the ones who only give us weekdays and not the other way around! Don’t you think it would make my like a lot easier if i could hand a weekend date over to unreasonable customers like you?? So don’t paint us to be all bad and how dare you call me a monkey! Frankly you seem to have the intellect of something far less intelligent than a monkey anyway!
P.S. RLD have had a bit of a difficult period recently but its all been sorted and at the end of the day ….we have the best and most diverse experiences to offer and were the pioneers of the experience gift so get over it! End of!!!

Bobby: What you’ve missed out on here, is that I always have and always will be polite and sweet to customer service/call centre people. I’m well aware of how much 8 hours a day of whiny people must feel, and I know the only way of getting a positive response and a bit of help is to be nice and polite.

It’s the policies themselves that are completely backwards and twisted, making it 90% admin, phone calls, emails and 10% enjoyment of the actual activity. This defeats the purpose completely.

I’ve yet to meet anyone who’s booked a RLD and has been happy with it from beginning to end! And it’s never the activity itself that comes up as problematic, rather the service surrounding it.

I just don’t think there’s enough people in the call centre, causing the ones who are there to be strung out, impatient and well… beligerant the way you’re proving to be. Obviously, cutting jobs won’t help the situation, but maybe it’s too far in the downwards spiral to stop it now.

Lets hope so…

Sebestian it is true that you can find many experiences much cheaper with other companies or on the web. However, lets hope you never have an accident doing one of these experiences because you will realise the reason they are cheaper is that they have skimped on insurance coverage and liability covarage. Hopefully this will never happen to you.

On the subject of Red Letter Days you are right they recently fired 14 out of their 160 staff. This doesn’t seem that drastic to me. Also if you read the bad press, most of it appears to be the people recently fired selling their stories to the press.

All companies go through bad times and I have been on at least 3 RLD’s myself and found them to be well organised and good value for money. I also didn’t have to wait very long to make my booking, then again I didn’t leave it until the last minute.

Looks like they’re toast.

From the Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2005/07/30/cnred30.xml&menuId=242&sSheet=/portal/2005/07/30/ixportal.html

I turned down a place to be on the first series of dragons den, I think Rachel the founder should spend more time with her own business, and is not in a good position to give out advice.

Suspicions that Red Letter Days is in financial trouble were further fuelled today by the sacking of 15 members of staff.
A recently recruited senior manager from the new Leeds office was devastated to learn that, after a high profile interview process in London earlier this year, during which she ‘won’ the most innovative idea for a new Red Letter Day Experience, she was one of the people asked to leave.

Red Letter Days will not honor my ferrari experience voucher. They will not refund the 250 pounds. The company that assumed the assets, Kroll, says they will not refund the money. Harrods, where it was purchased, will not refund. I have had 250 pounds stolen by RLD and there is nothing I can do about it. I’ve already spent hours on the phone with all three and they say the same thing. The visa won’t refund the money because it has been more than 60 days. If anybody has any advice, besides calling them again, I am at my wits end.

I was surfing for red letter days as well. Actually what I typed into google was RED LETTER DAYS RIP OFF. I am currently sat here on the phone on hold at Red Letter Days. I have had a £200 experience for about 6 months. I have booked twice but had it cancelled both times (bad weather). Now I hear that RLD is not going to pay me even though my experience was bought using a VISA card as it is longer than 60 days. Currently Watchdog is on TV so might drop by their site next as well. BOBBY if you are reading this, why not stop sitting there defending RLD and ANSWER THE BLOODY PHONE! (45 mins so far and counting.) How can a company just go bust overnight and then start up again the next day without honouring their committments. I would advise NO-ONE to book anything else with this absolute rip off company. Over priced and blatantly ripping people off. Very very Annoyed.

i am going to write into watchdog right now too. keep me posted if you receive a reply from RLD or get any useful advice on how to deal with our problem.

Hi,
Me again, I guess it might be an idea if I left a contact for the Studio?..it is Meadow Farm Studio 01773/740264 website http://www.meadowfarmstudio.co.uk
This offer applies to ALL EXPERIENCE VOUCHERS not honoured,not only the Purple/Studio vouchers.

Stewart Field. Managing Director

Hi

I’ve also missed out on my red letter days voucher for a VIP shopping spree at Topshop, which is valued at £145 and was for my 30th birthday present – usual fobbing off about lack of dates, availability etc. I appreciate its not the fault of the call centre staff and feel that they do get a lot of stick – I’m going to write to Kroll (who I am assuming are the administrators?) and also to Topshop directly to see if they will maybe take pity ! What a rip off !!

Hi,
Yes Red letter Days are a major rip off. I had a voucher that expired in august and made my booking about six months before it ran out. A few days before I was due to go on a flight last month Red Letter Days phoned to say it was cancelled as they no longer dealt with the airfield. I think it’s more a case of the airfield not dealing with them. They said I’d have to make another booking as soon as possible. Not a problem but when I called a couple of days later they said my voucher had expired and I couldn’t now use it. Even though they had cancelled the booking they said their terms and conditions didn’t allow them to make refunds. Legal? I’m currently seeking legal advice.

Now I think about it, this company just prints its own money. You pay in sterling, and they give you a piece of paper with their logo on it. But when it expires it’s worth nothing, and the company pockets the hard cash. I’ve lost £250 quid on a Ferrari Driving Voucher for my wife, when she became ill and couldn’t use it in the timescale.

I will never buy another gift voucher from any company, ever again!!

We did not suffer from an expired voucher, rather the Rally Driving experience was definately not anything like the desciption. Far from a wonderful three hour experience my husband and son stood around for two hours 45 minutes and finally were allowed in the rally car (well a ford anyway)drove around a disused airfield and then were criticized for not doing it right. The voucher says they would get a momento of the day, a baseball cap but oops, they were out of stock and after having paid £390 for the “experience” they were even charged for the tea and coffee !! I complained and the nice people at RLD sent me two more vouchers for the blue experiences, which are neither use nor ornament to my husband or 20 yr old. Not only that, it will just cost us more money and time to actually get to any of the places. The vouchers are going back. Don’t suppose I will get any real money in return…….

As a former employee (a long time prior to the bankrupt episode), I can quite happily say that Red letter days used to be a great company both to work for and to be a customer of. However, things started to change. Richard Kaffel (at the time rumoured, probably correctly, by all the staff to be Rachel Kabra’s bit on the side) began taking over more of the day to day running of the company and ‘SNAFU’ became the normal state of operation. Rachel turned up to approve designs and check out the marketing campaigns but had no clue about the actual customers and their feelings or the treatment of the suppliers of the various ‘experiences’ (they regularly got paid late if at all).

All in all, the people at the firm were actually pretty competant and generally pleasant but the instructions and business practices handed down from senior management (We do not give refunds etc…..) were the sort of thing that one would expect from AOL. Far too much focus on marketing and branding with not enough emphasis on quality, integrity and transparency (also know as good old fashioned common sense). It is all very well being the ‘market leader’ but if you are leading a field with almost no competition that is not difficult but as soon as lastminute.com and numerous others (even the supplier themselves via the internet) get in on the act you have to lead the field by actually being GOOD at what you do. Hell, I even new suppliers that refused to deal with RLD as their billing and payments practices were so bad (just tip toeing on the right side of legal….. if you stretch the law a little).

Hi Vero – I came across these old posts about Red Letter Days whilst doing price comparisons for my own gift experience company (Gift Experience Scotland Ltd). Although aware of many RLD problems during our initial market research, I had no idea things had gotten so bad. I just want to say thank you to you and your comments for reminding me exactly why we treat both our suppliers and customers with the utmost respect and politeness. Never in a million years do I want this sort of thing to happen to our company and to this end we pay our suppliers BEFORE the customer books and we are as flexible as possible when it comes to expiry dates etc. I just don’t understand the reason for the extra charging when supplier prices went up – that is the main reason for an expiry date – so you can guarantee that price to the customer.

Their prices are inflated too – during my price checks I found them to be sometimes 50% more expensive than us, and I know that we use the same suppliers for the particular experiences I’m talking about. Rest assured that we won’t be putting our prices in line with RLD. Anyway, to summarise, please don’t let your bad experience put you off – there ARE experience companies out there that act with integrity and great customer service. Thanks for reading this

Kerry

As a current and long time employee of RLD, can I also just add that Bobby is no longer an employee here and for good reason as you can see. We’re under new ownership and have addressed many of the concerns raised throughout this post. Many thanks :o)

Hi there,

I noticed that you have said that Gift Experience Scotland has gone the same way but the business is still running (6 years strong) and has no problems paying suppliers / running experiences. We’re actually expanding at the moment.

I work with Gift Experience Scotland and would be happy to help you if you have a specific problem. Please contact me through the website and I will be happy to help.

Gail

My son had red letter day driving experience booked for Monday 22nd June,
he has booked hotel and train tickets (non refundable)
the driving centre has just called and cancelled his booking cause they are resurfacing the track !
when he told them about the hotel their response was ‘tough not our problem’