A couple of days ago, Air New Zealand sent out and email informing Airpoints members about the one day only opportunity to collect quadruple Airpoints Dollars by spending spending $50 or more in a single transaction at New World’s Christmas Shopper Event which ran on Thursday 3 December. This got me excited because of the opportunity to earn extra Airpoints Dollars for doing something that I do on a weekly basis.
Want to maximise on earning @FlyAirNZ #Airpoints? Earn quadruple #Dollars™ by shopping at New World today! pic.twitter.com/8AtdwlrYtS
— Gerri Ndoro (@gerri50) December 2, 2015
But, in my case, it meant going to a supermarket where I usually don’t do my grocery shopping for a couple of reasons that I won’t go in to (nothing bad). I eventually did go and am glad I did because not only was I able to save a decent amount of a few items, it was lively event with quite a bit going on. My shopping at New World got me thinking about an unfortunate situation regarding earning extra Airpoints that took place at the start of the year. At the time, I ended up eventually conceding defeat and leaving it be so that I could concentrate on the more important things in life but today I have decided to share it.
So, at the start of the year, we decided to take family trip to Rotorua and when deciding on where to stay, I recalled having seen an email from Air New Zealand about a double Airpoints Dollars offer for stays at any IHG hotel. That said, one of the places to stay that was already on our shortlist was Holiday Inn Rotorua which is an IHG property and given what was on offer, we settled on that.
Shortly after our getaway, I was credited the standard amount of points for the stay and left it a little while for the bonus Airpoints to be credit. After a couple of months or so, I decided to get in touch with Air New Zealand to query the matter and after sending a couple of emails and mailing them hardcopies of my reservations and the email newsletter that they sent about the offer, I eventually got the following response:
Thank you for sending us enquiry and information for your hotel stay at Holiday Inn Rotorua regarding Double Points Promotion.
I regret to advise you we are unable to process your request as IHG has declined your claim with below cut and paste insert.
I do not see the member is registered for any promotions/offers that could entitle him w/ bonus Airpoints.
If you have any discrepancies with the above decision please contact the hotel directly.
Kind Regards,
Sam (not real name)
Airpoints Support
As you can imagine, this is not at all the response I was hoping for and I was quite annoyed by it. My solace at the time was that my family and I had had an awesome time in Rotorua and an excellent long weekend stay at the Holiday Inn.
Thank you @gerri50 for staying at @HIrotorua. Glad you enjoyed your stay and visit to @RainbowRotorua.
— Holiday Inn Rotorua (@HIrotorua) February 4, 2015
So why am I even sharing this? Well, lets just throw in a couple of scenarios where for example you decide on staying at a hotel that really wasn’t you first choice and don’t have the best stay with them? Or, you shop at New World on the 3rd and spend a whole lot of money (some on things that you don’t really need) and all as part of a quest of maximising on opportunities to gain extra Airpoints Dollars? And then, at the end of it all, with you already upset about the decisions you have made, the other party doesn’t make good on what they said they would do for you!
It’s very easy to make a decision based on what another party says they will do for you but that other party may not come to the table and met their end of the bargain. There could be wide and varying reasons as to why that could happen. What I’m trying to do is to get you to think about decisions that you make to do things that are outside your norm and even more so, ones that see you parting with more money than the norm for nothing! What do you do then?
Have you been in such a situation before? What advice do you have on how to deal with it?
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