Giving experience vouchers that don't cover the full cost of the experience

[saltycashew]

I was recently given a £50 voucher by a group of friends for an experience / days out website. While it was a very lovely and generous gesture, I've gone to the website to redeem it for an experience that I want only to discover that there is nothing available to the value of £50 for me to redeem towards.

The £50 experiences are only available to book as a pair (price per person) - so essentially £100, not £50.

The other experiences I'm interested in are all half or full days and run £135-£175 which would mean I'd need to come up with and cover the remainder myself. I can't afford that at the moment.

I really don't intend for this to sound ungrateful because it was a very thoughtful gesture. I feel bad that my friends have essentially wasted their money on something I may not be able to use and enjoy before it expires.

AIBU to be frustrated by gifts like this when there's limited choice on what can be redeemed?

*I'm specifically talking about gift vouchers where the value cannot be redeemed for anything of that value that the recipient could use.

A £25 gift voucher to a shop like Oliver Bonas could most likely cover the full or near the cost of something - even if it's just a pair of socks or some earrings. Plus there's a consistent turnover of stock with new things to chose from. A £25 gift voucher to the Louis Vuitton store on the other hand would require a significant investment from the recipient in order to use it.

Yes this would annoy me too. Surely the gift giver would be aware that you would have to supplement this with your own money?

Yes this is so annoying. I remember being gifted a spa experience one which was lovely but when I went to book the small print said it was only valid Monday-Friday, I ended up taking a day off work and having to have my mum pick up DD from nursery so I could use it!

Yes, YANBU. Very thoughtless of the givers to not actually check the pricing of the experiences and what the face value of the voucher would actually cover. It's like giving you half a gift. Very lazy really!

YANBU

Have your friends asked what you're going to book?

YANBU How long is the expiry? Could you ask for another voucher next year for the same place so you can book one of the £100 things?

It's annoying. We were given a voucher for a pet portrait session - a single 5x7 photo was included so of course we ended up spending more on 3 larger ones and mounting and framing! If I was ever given another I'd pass it on to someone else for a raffle prize or something 😄

Some of them let you refund the vouchers if they've not been spent, usually within a timeframe though (30 days for Virgin experiences). When did they buy it? A bit of honesty might be needed here, and maybe the purchaser can get the money back!

We've been victims of this too. And as it's a gift you can't really complain without sounding ungrateful. We ended up adding money and redeeming the voucher for something we weren't really bothered about doing.

£50 cash would have been so much more useful and would have cost the gifter the same amount.

That's just a lose-lose situation. You didn't get a present and the gifter spent £50 for nothing!