Restaurant.com

I rarely say this but: don't even bother.

It *sounds* like a great deal. Spend $25 & get $50 in gift certificates at a ton of great restaurants. That's what I thought too. We're all watching our pennies these days but we still want to enjoy our lives, right?

My goal was to have a wonderful dinner with my fella & celebrate our 2 year anniversary in style. I went to the site, read the terms & conditions for the restaurant we wanted to dine at carefully & purchased 4 gift certificates.

What they don't tell you is that you can only use ONE gift certificate for $25 for your party at a time, only ONCE PER MONTH per restaurant. (Even if you sit at separate tables & use separate checks!) This is not made clear to you until AFTER you've already made your purchase & printed out your gift certificates.

So how far do you think $25 goes at a fine dining establishment? Especially when you are REQUIRED to purchase at least 2 entrees & 18% gratuity is automatically added before you get the check.

There I was stuck with 4 gift certificates for the same place, in a town we don't live in, that would take 4 months to use. I immediately tried to contact customer service to see if something could be done, but of course they close on weekends. That left me & my sweetie to come up with another place to eat on what was left of our budget.

As if that weren't enough, when I called during the week I was put on hold for 20 minutes plus waiting to talk to anyone real about it. With a busy work schedule & home life it took me 4 tries to get through. The final time I gritted my teeth & waited on hold for nearly 30 minutes.

In short: DEEPLY UNIMPRESSED. Save your money, go to Groupon or Travelzoo or even Yelp, who often has deals for your favorite places.

This company offers "gift certificates" for you to pay for that will be worth more than you paid for it with a minimum purchase, which if worked still worked out to your benefit, but lately they have offered establishments of restaurants that didn't agree to use them. Have been turned down on many occasions after purchasing the certificate by the restaurants that say they never agreed or they are no longer participating. So you buy it and can't get your money back only exchange it for another which may in turn do the same thing. I recently took one in and the owner/manager said he never agreed to this and it's a scam and wouldn't honor the certificate that was paid for. I called restaurant.com and it took them weeks to get it off the website so others bought it and couldn't use it or get their money back. I have just bought one and the establishment was closed down when i got there. I called today and will see how long it takes them to remove it. Bernie told me that he just takes the message and passes it to the restaurant dept and it's up to them. Sometimes the restaurants decide they no longer want to participate and that's just your loss because per restaurant.com there aren't "contracts." In the past this was a great site and seemed to work fine, but lately I'm not sure who is calling with the agreements, but I'm a little suspicious that something isn't exactly right since they added an establishment without authorization of the owner and on another occasion added a restaurant that has been closed down for a while. My suggestion would be to call the restaurant ahead of time and ask if they are still or have they ever decided to participate in this program before you go, because some are legit while others are not and it takes a very long time for them to remove the establishments off the site that are no longer participating after a phone call letting them know it is not. Too bad that this was a great concept that turned into a scam.

We were given a deal where we could get 2 movie tickets and a $100 restaurant giftcard for $30. We read the fine print which stated you could choose from lots of restaurants and did not list any additional fees or strings attached. So we purchased it. Once you purchase it and try to redeem the code comes the load of crap. There were only 10 restaurants to choose from(mostly rinkydink locations, the nicest one being a bistro in a hotel) and only 2 in our actual city. Then you can not use the value on one visit. It has to be broken down into increments based on each restaurant and each place you had to spend double the certificate amount to be able to use it. So basically if we wanted to use the $25 certificate which was the largest it could be broken down into, we would have to spend $50 to get $25 dollars off. And you would have to get 4 certificates to get the value(or even more complicated break it down into $5 certificates for other restaurants) and you can only use 1 certificate per visit with only 1 visit allowed per month. Which means we would have to go 4 separate months and spend $25 to $30 each time on top of using the certificate. Which means you did not get the $30 great deal. You actually have to spend a total of around $160. And it lists none of this "extra" costs and strings and crap in the original fine print, it's after you have already wasted your money and cant get it back. Plus the website is complicated and crappy. I wouldn't ever purchase anything to do with restaurant.com ever again and would not ever recommend it to anyone ever. It's a huge lie and a total scam. Waste of time and money.