I missed CarFest due to technical issues with vouchers: Why won’t Virgin Experience Days refund me for the days? CRANE IN THE CASE

On August 1, 2024, I ordered two tickets to the CarFest motorsports and music festival.

I ordered them as a gift for my friend through Virgin Experience Days and paid £201.99. The event in Hampshire was due to take place on August 24.

The voucher arrived shortly after I paid, with instructions to activate the tickets online.

I entered the coupon codes on the Virgin website and was then told to visit another link to get the tickets, but the link didn’t work.

I asked Virgin for help six times between August 5 and 12, but they kept telling me to go to the same link. I also asked my son-in-law to see if he could access the link, but he couldn’t.

We were promised a response by August 14, and when it didn’t arrive we worried that we wouldn’t receive our tickets on time and that the money would be wasted.

So on August 16, we canceled the tickets through the “help” function on Virgin’s website and requested a refund.

I also contacted CarFest and the same day I canceled I reached out to say the issue was now fixed and I would receive an email with the tickets.

These would now have been useless as they had been cancelled, but anyway, the email never arrived.

We couldn’t go to the festival and so far we still haven’t received a refund because Virgin says the coupon code was “used”. Can you please help? S.B.

Helen Crane, This is Money’s consumer advocate, responds: It sounds like your booking with Virgin was quite an experience, but unfortunately not in the way you expected.

Virgin Experience Days sells days of everything from afternoon tea to hot air balloon rides and race car driving.

Most people who buy one do so as a gift and the experience is sent as a gift voucher to the lucky recipient.

But Virgin doesn’t provide the experiences directly, so the recipient often must contact the third-party organizer to redeem their voucher for tickets, as in your case, or to reserve a date and time to attend the experience.

In your case, you received the voucher yourself and were going to get tickets to the event at Laverstoke Park in Hampshire for both yourself and your friend.

It was set to be a fun day with plenty of movers and shakers and artists such as The Verve’s Richard Ashcroft, Olly Murs and UB40 on the bill.

But unfortunately, exchanging the voucher for tickets was what slowed their efforts.

You duly copied the codes from your physical voucher onto the Virgin website, but the link to get the tickets on the CarFest website didn’t work.

He contacted Virgin repeatedly for help, but received the same response, or none at all. They just told you to visit the same link that doesn’t work.

He then contacted CarFest directly, but when he didn’t hear back within a couple of days, he made the difficult decision to cancel the tickets, a week before the event.

You didn’t want the festival date to pass and risk not being allowed a refund, and your friend was worried about arranging the trip on such short notice.

In the air: Perhaps Virgin Experience Days’ most famous offering is its hot air balloon flights

Virgin offers refunds up to 30 days after purchasing the voucher, as long as it has not been redeemed. But when he entered his coupon code on the website, he was told that it had been “used” and therefore he couldn’t easily get his money back.

You had weeks of painful online chat exchanges with a Virgin customer service person, who kept telling you they would contact CarFest on your behalf, but no refund ever materialized.

To add insult to injury, he received an email from See Tickets, the ticketing company that would have provided him with the tickets if he ever received them, the day after CarFest ended, asking if he enjoyed it.

You contacted me to ask if I could help, and I contacted Virgin to ask why it was so difficult to provide a simple £200 refund.

He told me that the reason you couldn’t activate the tickets was because of a “system issue.”

That’s out of your control, but it doesn’t explain why customer service gave you the runaround and why you couldn’t be granted a refund more quickly when you requested it.

However, I am happy to inform you that Virgin have now been in touch and have refunded the £201.99 paid.

A spokesperson for Virgin Experience Days said: “We are extremely sorry for the inconvenience and disappointment caused when (she) and her son were trying to activate their CarFest voucher.”

‘It appears there was a problem with the system when the voucher was redeemed and cancelled, so it has taken longer than usual to process the refund.

‘We remain in contact with (the customer) and our stepped-up support team has issued a refund. We strive to resolve any customer query as quickly as possible and we are very sorry for your experience in this case.

You told me: ‘Virgin Experience? More like Virgin Palaver. Needless to say, I will never book another.”