£8 on it that I can't use, and another £4 in limbo (Boots Advantage Card)

Member Name: jennikitten

Product:	Boots Advantage Card
Date:	26/10/09 (54 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good points to pound ratio, environmentally friendly vouchers

Disadvantages: See review

Three and a half stars for this one really...

The Boots Advantage card, as I'm sure you know, is a loyalty card that you earn points on when you spend money in Boots. At 4 points per £1, and with 1 point equalling 1p, it's known for being the most 'generous' loyalty card (compare it to Tesco, for example, where you currently have to spend £50 for a £1 voucher).

The card is free to sign up for, but as usual with these things you're signing away your personal information and shopping habits, which is where the big money is made for the company.

In each big Boots store, they have an advantage card machine, which works like an ATM. Instead of money it has offers that you can print out to use instore. These offers have steadily declined since the recession and when I checked the other day, most of the 13 offers were competitions or prize draws rather than actual store discounts. I also felt that the offers were less personal to my shopping habits than from other companies such as Sainsburys. However, they work well for the environment as you only need to print what you're going to use, rather than the waste produced when posting coupons out to people.

The advantage card is a bit of a pain when used at self-service checkouts, because you need to put it in the opposite way round to every other chip and pin card in existence - which I never remember to do.

Recently, I found out you can check your points balance online by signing up for a free account. This is quick and easy to do, and handy if you're trying to plan your shopping. Soon after I signed up, I received an email saying that due to a technical error they'd issued me a new card and my current card was thus invalid. A couple of weeks on, I still haven't received my new card - a big pain, particularly as I spent £100 in Boots at the weekend. You can get the cashier to validate your receipt if you forget/lose/invalidate your card, which I did, but it's annoying to carry a receipt around and the points have to be redeemed within 45 days (so I hope my card arrives before then). If I hadn't just signed up for an online account with Boots, I would have been confused and even more annoyed that my card had apparently stopped working, especially with £8 on it.

I think the Boots card lulls people into a false sense of security, because often things can be bought cheaper elsewhere, particularly with sales and online shopping. You feel like you're saving money and cheating the system, but in reality it's often cheaper to shop in Wilkinsons, pound shops, those cheap beauty shops and Superdrug.

Many people like to save up their points all year, and then buy things from Boots at Christmas. Occasionally there are a few deals where you actually 'make' money on certain products because of point bonuses. But don't buy more than you need or will use or you're not saving anything.

A star (and a half) knocked off because of their 'technical error', the fact that I still haven't received my new card, I have points which I can't actually spend, the declining quality of offers and the way that other shops are cheaper for most things even with Boots' points scheme.

Summary: It's okay, but a bit misleading