Vouchers now a more secure gift thanks to legislation
HEATHER Humphreys will have endeared herself to consumers by pushing through legislation that will protect Christmas shoppers who buy gift vouchers.
The Minister for Business, Enterprise and Innovation announced on Friday that the longawaited Consumer Protection (Gift Vouchers) Act 2019 will come into operation tomorrow.
The intervention will go some way to addressing the perception that vouchers are just ‘cash with strings attached’.
The minister estimated Irish shoppers will save ‘millions’ by the elimination of the expiry date on vouchers.
Ms Humphreys said: ‘Many gift vouchers until now have had expiry periods of just one or two years and in some cases it has been as little as six months. As of Monday anyone who receives a gift voucher will have the certainty that it will be valid for at least five years.’
‘Some businesses have also required consumers to spend a voucher in full in a single transaction.
‘This meant if you have a restaurant voucher for €100 and your meal came to €80, you were prevented from getting change or a voucher with the balance of €20,’ Ms Humphreys said.
The new Bill outlaws any term in a gift voucher contract that requires the full value of a voucher to be spent in one transaction. Where a gift voucher cannot be used more than once and the consumer does not spend the full amount, the business will now be required to reimburse the customer.
Also banned will be contract terms that prevent consumers from using more than one gift voucher in a transaction.
Certain airlines also cancelled gift vouchers where the name on
the voucher was not identical to the person’s name on their passport.
Some airlines also charged recipients to change the name on the voucher. (No prizes for guessing who!).
Ms Humphreys said: ‘Consumers have had vouchers cancelled by airlines where their name as given on their passport differed even slightly from their name as given by the friend or relative who bought the gift voucher for them.
‘This meant if a person bought a voucher for their friend Liz but the name on the passport was actually Elizabeth, then the airline could actually cancel the voucher entirely or charge the recipient to correct the name.’
A third provision in the legislation bans this practice.
However some problems with vouchers still persist.
The worst are ‘maintenance fees’ costing up to €3.50 per month, which consumer watchdogs warn could gobble up the entire value of the voucher after a certain amount of time.
A draft version of the Bill included a provision for banning fees but this was later removed on the advice of the Attorney General as it was at risk of being incompatible with an EU directive on electronic money transfer.
Comsumer magazine Which? warns that the company issuing the voucher could well go bust in the current climate of uncertainty for major stores beset by online competition.
It named a long list of household-name retailers in the UK to go to the great shopping mall in the sky in recent years: Dixons, Maplin, Toys R Us, BHS, Woolworths and Thomas Cook. The magazine advises shoppers to be honest and just ‘hand over the money’ if you can’t think of anything decent to buy as a present.