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?

I really wouldn’t sweat the small stuff on this.

Your DH paid for afternoon tea. He was happy to pay £130. You had afternoon tea, pre-paid.

What the hotel does with the discount scheme is irrelevant- they’re not profiting off you, and they’ve likely had a massively shit year so if the government wants to give them £40 just assume it’s none of your business. If you were happy to support their business at £130 in May, then just consider it done. They didn’t charge you £40 extra.

I would assume no change given from specific service vouchers.
Pretty standard tbh.

So they applied the discount and will get an extra £40, or they could have ignored the scheme and charged your voucher in full.

Either way, you pay the same so what does it matter!

You also say you just happened to book on the last day of EOTHO. If you’d booked a day later, it wouldn’t be an issue - you didn’t book expecting the discount, so it’s irrelevant what happens when they report to the government. Don’t let it spoil the experience you paid for.

you usualy dont get change from vouchers and you have to bring up anything at the time not when you get home

If they treated it as a pre-paid voucher, they shouldn’t have applied the discount for their own benefit. So whilst the OP shouldn’t have got it on this occasion, neither should the restaurant. Tell them since they're not clarifying you’ll report them for frafulently claiming the money 🤷‍♀️

Might it be that the hotel cannot claim back on vouchers?

I couldn't get worked up about this.

Your DH paid £130 for afternoon tea and was clearly happy to pay that price. You then got a voucher for the afternoon tea to be used at your convenience.

The food was paid for. Most voucher schemes won't give you money back or let you use the voucher in conjunction with other offers. I expect the EOTHO discount was just automatically applied at the till on the days it was valid and it wasn't anything specific applied by the server.

You got what your DH paid for, which is four afternoon teas. I suspect if you read the small print on your voucher, it would say it can't be used in conjunction with any other offers, and that it can't be exchanged for cash value.

This took some re-reading to understand! I haven't had enough sleep though. The voucher was bought prior to the EOHO scheme and the place you went to was in the scheme. Therefore you had pre-purchased a voucher which turned out to have a higher value than what you actually got on the day, as they discounted your bill for EOHO. Is that right? If you are concerned you overpaid you need to check the terms and conditions of the voucher at the time when you bought it.

I suppose you could have bought more food to the value of your voucher if the voucher didn't cover alcohol.

I can see both sides of the argument here.

I think in terms of the hotel they should have at least responded to my query explaining the voucher or something.
The waiter was clearly confused....

But in terms of how I feel about the place now.. It would be tricky to return.
It's created a bad feeling because they have not responded.

Rather than going after the fraud aspect it might be nice if the hotel gave you a £40 voucher towards food/another afternoon tea? Maybe if you suggest that rather than wanting to know where the money went then you'll have something that has value to you without hurting them?

The staff there have no idea about tax and the ones that do are probably furloughed. The hotel may not even survive this. No one gives change on vouchers either and they didn't charge you service (around £26 usually).

But it's not something you can afford to do usually and you bought wine. So rather than asking questions they can't answer offer solutions they can give. Because if they give you £40 back then that's change on a voucher and a logistical nightmare. I'm guessing with what's going on the time taken spent dealing with this gas cost them far more than £40.

It's only awkward in your head OP. You're clearly miffed they've somehow diddled you.

You cant refund cash to a voucher based on a scheme that the hospitality business wouldn't have been aware exists when the voucher was issued.

I dont work for an independent like you described but I've had the exact replica of what you've asked for come through as a complaint to me and I've very politely refused to refund. We have however extended vouchers and told guests they could use them at another time, you could have done this and then benefited from the discount by paying for that particular afternoon tea.

Their wrong to not reply to you but over August if this hotel was in a tourism hotspot they very probably being absolutely rammed with queries and complaints, I still have a small backlog left over from august I'm working through, we're only human and large majority of workforces are still on furlough when we were doing covers/room occupancies much higher than previous years - have a bit of compassion your complaint is nitpicking.

@Bulblasagne (great name, I tried that one year and it didn't work!) they don't know. It's a grey area not covered in govt guidelines (I looked). Don't blame a waiter for being confused about a complex tax situation. Only a very experienced accountant knows how their vouchers work. It's not fair to blame the staff of a business that has literally no way forward - if we go into another lockdown they won't survive.

No doubt they have asked someone outside of the hotel and that person is working from home or not working at all and they can't get through to hmrc. How long do you want them to spend on your £40 voucher? How many hours on hold? I've held for hmrc for several hours at a time only to be cut off because it's 5pm.

@TestingTestingWonTooFree

She didn’t get £40 off (£10pp) because she prepaid by buying a voucher.

Exactly. The scheme wasn’t operating in May when the voucher was paid for. So it doesn’t attract that benefit.

It's created a bad feeling because they have not responded

You should have discussed it at the time. It is a bit unrealistic to now expect them to trawl through all their receipts, work out which staff were in your table, conduct interviews etc. And for what purpose? So you can satisfy yourself that they won’t get £40 more than they should.

Forget about it, you will be a lot happier.

Yes, they should respond as part of customer service. But you’ve put them in an awkward situation for no real reason - now they’ll be wondering if they should refund you something out of goodwill, or investigate with the server, or recall the till receipt they’ve probably already processed ...

Basically you’ve created them unnecessary admin for a bit of a petty gripe. I agree good customer service is to reply promptly, and they haven’t done that, but you’ve sort of spoiled your own experience by not really understanding what your voucher was for in the first place. You can provide check the wording wherever your DH bought it in the first place, as they’ll list the T&Cs pre-purchase.

I’d let it go.

It's created a bad feeling because they have not responded.

But you've put them in an awkward position by e-mailing them in the first place. They don't owe you anything. You bought the voucher in May when the EOTHO scheme wasn't operating or even heard of. You're now in a huff because this means you didn't benefit from the discount.

You could have paid in cash, benefitted from the discount and used the voucher another time, but you chose not to for some reason. So you don't get the benefit of the discount.

What exactly do you want the hotel to say? Or are you after money?

The voucher wasn't for £x it was for 4 afternoon teas. Which is what you got. Just a shame the value was half so you feel short changed.

You had a voucher to the value of £130 for afternoon tea. You arrived and were presented with the invoice reduced by £40 due to the eat out scheme. (So I'm assuming that's 4 people at £10 each for the eat out scheme)

I think that by giving you the invoice at the reduced rate the hotel needs to cancel the original voucher replacing it with one to cover the teas and one for £40. The eat out scheme was to benefit customers as well as create trade.

.

@vanillandhoney

It's created a bad feeling because they have not responded.

But you've put them in an awkward position by e-mailing them in the first place. They don't owe you anything. You bought the voucher in May when the EOTHO scheme wasn't operating or even heard of. You're now in a huff because this means you didn't benefit from the discount.

You could have paid in cash, benefitted from the discount and used the voucher another time, but you chose not to for some reason. So you don't get the benefit of the discount.

What exactly do you want the hotel to say? Or are you after money?

This. Are you wanting them to give you the £40? Also the voucher may have been worth £130 but is this what your DH paid for it?

I really could not give this headspace to be honest. If your email to them was anything like your first couple of posts on this thread they are probably confused as to what you are trying to communicate. Your OP says that you brought two extra drinks.
If I received an email from a customer who stated that they brought extra drinks I would be confused as bringing your own drinks would not be something that generally happens.
In addition to this you had a voucher that covered 4 afternoon teas. You got 4 afternoon teas so what is the problem. The voucher covered a specific thing so it was not that you had a voucher for £130 that could have been put towards a meal in the hotel restaurant or an overnight stay. It was specifically for the afternoon tea which you got.
To be honest even with all that aside do you really grudge a business that has been forced to close for months, put staff on furlough or even make some redundant a few quid. There is a very high chance that they will be asked to close again at short notice for an undertermined time. You are being very petty.

You had your afternoon though as per the voucher. Which was already paid for anyway. I do see why are annoyed but think you need to let it go.

I agree that the hotel is probably still trying to parse your email; it wasn’t clear from your first posts what the problem was or what you want the outcome to be. Why mention the drinks if they’re a moot point?

I think it comes down to whether this was a nominal voucher for afternoon tea “worth £130” but actually bought for less; or more like a pre-loaded gift card with £130 on it so the equivalent of cash. What did your husband actually spend?

I still don’t get why you waited to use it during a one-off discount scheme period in the middle of a pandemic.

And the real crucial question: did you have a nice time? Because if you did, what does the rest of it matter?

I'm not sure how the scheme and claiming works but just because the till (I assume automatically) showed a discount on a receipt does that mean they're actually going to claim for it? As the voucher was paid for before the scheme started I assume they cant and you really dont know how they deal with the claim, surely its just as likely they wont claim as they will?
As for the reply to your email - if it was explained like your OP then maybe they dont understand what your getting at? It's not very clear.

Either your DH paid for 4 Afternoon Teas (regardless of cost on the day) or he had a £130 voucher.

If it is the former then the amount he actually paid is irrelevant as the voucher was for a specific service with no guaranteed value. Your DH paid for for ATs when they were valued at £30pp, but when he arrived they were being sold at £20pp. That is a risk you take when you prepay as there is no guarantee the price will not reduce - If the menu price of the AT had gone up £10pp since your DH bought the vouchers, would you have been happy to pay the extra? Or should "voucher value" only work in your favour?

I work for a supermarket and it's like when people buy stuff online for full price and when they come in to collect their order we are having an in store sale and we are selling the same item 50% cheaper. They always want to return their order and buy it instore at half price, but if they bought it in online sale they would never want to return/buy in a situation where they would pay more in store. This is the same, your DH paid for a service, when you came to use the service its value had been reduced by a "sale" but you dont get to claim back the difference.

The only way that would be possible is if it was the latter situation where your DH bought a voucher for services to a specific value. That means he basically said "Here is £130 that I will put towards £130 worth of services on the day we visit." How far that £130 goes depends on the price of the service on the day. Due to the EOTHO scheme they should have either advised that you could only use one offer so could save the voucher for another iccasion; said the £130 would only be credited to the pre-discount rate and you would get no partial credit back for any unused money; or that they would take your voucher but because of the EOTHO discount being automatically applied they would give you the EOTHO discount value to use at another time.