Tax one. Eat out scheme, we had a voucher and the receipt took money off fe eat out but that wasn't passed to us?

[Bulblasagne]

So our voucher covered 4 afternoon teas and we happened to book it on the last day of the scheme.

Our receipt showed 2 extra drinks I brought but also took £40 is off for the scheme. The person was confused and had just come into a shift and charged us for the drinks.
After dh said he is sure that they will be claiming that eat out tax back due to our receipt and yet we didn't get the benefit?

I've emailed and called the hotel twice about it, over 2 weeks ago and not heard back.
It maybe a small amount but surely that's still fraud?

As others have said, depends on the terms of the voucher. If your voucher was for “4 afternoon teas”, then you got what you paid for. Unfortunate that you could have had it cheaper had you not done so because the EOTHO scheme came along, but that’s life sometimes. If, however, your voucher was for a certain amount of money, then I agree that something is wrong here.

Your DH bought the voucher for a specific service - the afternoon tea - they may have had a nominal amount attached (£130) but actually it was for the service and not functioning as a voucher for the establishment. For that reason the voucher covered the afternoon tea and not any extras. The price they change for the service may have changed but they doesn’t change what you get as your voucher was for the service and not for a set amount to use over time (unlike, for example, a next voucher). That’s why you had to pay for the wine.

The till treated your bill like a normal bill (hence it looking like the eat out offer applied) but as you were paying by prepay voucher no other discounts were valid.

It’s not great, and I think you should have got the wine included considering, but that’s what will have happened.

If the voucher was for 'Afternoon Tea' and you happened to use it on a day when the price was discounted due to EOTHO then I think what they have done is completely fair and correct.

If your voucher was for £130 then they should have given you £40 of vouchers back to cover the discounted price on that day.

I think it completely comes down to what the voucher was actually for.

@StCharlotte

But at the very least you should have had discount for the drinks I'd have thought.

Why didnt you ask?

Check the fine print on your voucher. Many of them can't be used in conjunction with other offers. I assume that includes the 'eat out to help out' offer.

EOTHO didn’t apply on alcohol, were the drinks more wine?

The critical part here is whether you had a voucher worth £130 that you chose to spend on afternoon tea or if you had a voucher for afternoon tea that didn’t have an alternative monetary voucher. Does DH remember?

Was the voucher bought direct from the hotel or was it a Groupon or similar deal?

I see what you mean - and yes, I think you should have been given a voucher for the difference between the value of your afternoon tea & wine, and the value of your voucher. If they’re claiming the £40 from both you and from EOTHO they’re being dishonest at your expense.

It may be that EOTHO doesn’t apply when payment is made by voucher, but if that were so the discount shouldn’t have been shown on your bill at all.

The fact that the drinks where extra suggests they Voucher was for 4 afternoon teas and the £130 was just what he had paid for that service. If that is the case they haven’t done anything wrong.

If it was a voucher for £130 to spend as you pleased in the establishment then they should have applied the discount or explained if you couldn’t use both for some reason

Ah I get it. You paid 130 for the voucher, they claim the eat out scheme and claimed youd only paid 80 to gov so gov will give them 40 quid. But still charged you extra drinks. Yeah I'd question them, they've tried to take advantage of the scheme and it probably would have worked if they'd given you your wine free for being a part of it. I mean it's easy, if you kept the receipt, tell them you'll report them.

I agree: if it was a voucher for the ££ value of the tea, they should have given you a further voucher for the value if the Gvt discount.

In effect you paid in vouchers rather than cash. They took vouchers of greater value than the final receipt for the afternoon tea.

The extra glasses of wine are a red herring.

Everywhere I went on the scheme took 50% off the whole bill even if it was more than £10 off per person I was well chuffed, though I know they didnt have to do this. One restaurant I ordered on my phone 4 different transactions so it was 2 drinks ones, starter and main and then dessert and we got 50% off each one. Hope you get it sorted op.

Unsure why people have voted YABU as you definately are not. I'd feel scammed if I was you

On annoyed they havant got back to me but also... I'll be annoyed if they get a refund from the back of my receipt.
It's not a chain hotel but quite a large posh one.
I'll be annoyed if they gain money from us in that way.

The drinks are a moot point, I knew they would be extra but the server made us feel like he was doing us a favour by not charging us service charge!

Why are you annoyed that they going to get an extra £40? The scheme was to help businesses and it makes no difference to you.

@MomToTwoBabas

Everywhere I went on the scheme took 50% off the whole bill even if it was more than £10 off per person I was well chuffed, though I know they didnt have to do this. One restaurant I ordered on my phone 4 different transactions so it was 2 drinks ones, starter and main and then dessert and we got 50% off each one. Hope you get it sorted op.

Well that is definitely fraud and they're lucky if nobody has reported them for doing so.

Urgh the level of pettiness that oozes out of this OP is just awful. Seriously it makes no difference to you whatsoever, how unpleasant that your first thought is that someone may have had a benefit and you want to stop that. What a petty little person you are.

Yes you are right but I personally wouldn't blame the hotel, they have lost so much revenue this year, them getting £40 off the government is a pittance compared. If you has gone the following day it would have cost what you paid anyway

They sold the voucher in May so no money apart from drinks went to them at the time of the scheme. Regardless of what the till says they probably can't claim it or don't know if they can/how it works. For their tax year that money went into their cash flow in May. The service was provided in sept. Can they claim It? I'd be surprised. They probably need to ask their accountant and what with having their business slashed by 90% and being fucked by Covid for the foreseeable future haven't quite got time.

@lemonsandlimes123 yeah fraud is really cool, and we will all end up paying for the EOTHO scheme, if they had the full payment they shouldn't have also claimed for it.

Where do people think the money for the scheme is coming from? It's us, the tax payers. I wonder how many people will be praising it when income tax goes up, when you realise it cost more than half a billion pounds.

You're right OP, you paid the full amount so they shouldn't have claimed the £40 from the scheme.

For their tax year that money went into their cash flow in May.

That's not how voucher sales should be applied. If that's what they were doing then they definitely need an accountant, and a new business model.

I don't think anyone who wasn't on the other side of this has any idea how complicated this could become when dealing with things like vouchers, tables ordering together and then paying separately, using online ordering/payments systems, taking alcohol off the whole bill and then working out if more than £10 per person had been spent so whether to reduce the price by £10pp or 50%.
And that's before the whining about having to wait while the bill was worked out and the ones who half understood the scheme and decided that we are ripping them off because their bill wasn't 50% off as they had alcohol.
There wasn't much time to prepare or train staff or change systems for it, mistakes were made.
It's very telling though that most people love to think rather than genuine mistakes in most cases that all the businesses were just out to rip them off. Why does everyone have to treat service staff like the bloody enemy all the time? See the bigger picture and rhe constraints and restraints that the people having to action these things are under and stop being so bloody minded and petty about it.
Honestly the general public have in general (!) Behaved like a bunch of spoiled toddlers since lockdown ended where going out and using pubs/restaurants are concerned.

Lemon in all honesty I do feel petty.
However, we've never been able to afford an afternoon tea before and it was a big deal for us.
I know many people do it regularly or perhaps even once a year for tradition. We've never done it so it was really out of the ordinary for us and the wording on the voucher makes perfect sense.

But I do feel irked that this hotel has a receipt showing this discount, which wasn't actually given to us. So yes for them to benefit from us to the tune of 50 and yet not even respond to my query does feel grubby.
Maybe they got round the receipt and did not claim the tax back? But again why not just tell me?

I said it was a special occasion, I'd been waiting to realise the voucher for months and we didn't want to make a fuss there and then... But could they explain what happened with the bill..

Geology I totally get that, which is why we were very polite at the time and raised it after with their finance department. And paying for the drinks was never my query.