The poor OP came on here for some support and look what has happened! This is supposed to be a helpful place!
Surely when you receive a gift voucher, you check the expiry date and use it within that time, weather it's three months or 3 years! I think most people don't expect to be able to use a voucher that has gone out of date!
If you personally want to honour an out of date voucher that that's great, but equally, if you don't want to honour and out of date voucher, then that's also great! We can each run our businesses as we see fit!
To be fair, the OP said;
"Have any of you experienced something like this before? And do you think i dealt with it correctly?"
That's asking for opinions on a forum. I really don't like it when it gets personal (and I've not been), I saw it as an opportunity to discuss how we see vouchers.
On the face of it it's a small subject, but clearly it extrapolates feelings on how we see our business in some kind of way. Which is interesting.
Anyway- good luck to the OP, hope the situation resolves itself. But what I WOULD say is, don't discount the opportunity to learn from other professionals and business owners by digging heels in on assumptions
I change the way my design business works almost monthly based on things I'm learning, on here, on design forums and from my clients!
My last words on the subject would be the following (and this isn't really anything to do with the OP's question, just general observations, because I find it interesting, as I'm in a kinda unique situation where I design vouchers and voucher schemes all day long as a designer, but also we own a salon that uses vouchers too, so I see them on the "coal-face" so to speak).
When we sell vouchers in our salon I see it this way
1. We're flattered that people want to pay for our services in advance.
2. We're delighted when they come in to redeem it as it gives us an opportunity to "up-sell" and make more money (cynical yes, but this aint a hobby!)
3. By letting them redeem a voucher (and not creating barriers) we're giving ourselves an opportunity to impress them with our service and convert them in to a regular client. Repeat business is the secret to any successful business.
By not doing that, we're losing 2 and 3 and creating problems from a PR point of view.
We're not Tesco, we can't "absorb" problems easily (and nor do we have the time and inclination to deal with them), and therefore our "rules" (such as they are)
have to be bent and broken occasionally. As I said before, with both my businesses the only times we stand incredibly firm is if the client is
costing us money.
