Eat Out For Half The Price! (restaurantvouchers.co.uk)

Member Name: blonde_girl774

Product:	restaurantvouchers.co.uk
Date:	23/06/09 (135 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great Choice of Money Saving Vouchers & Really Easy to Navigate Around.

Disadvantages: Quite a New Site so Quite Small.

One of my hobbies is eating out, especially when I just can't be bothered to cook! Of course with the recent credit crunch I found I had to cut back a little bit on my restaurant visits, that was until I discovered certain websites which meant I could eat out for far less than I used to. If I know I'm meant to be going out for a meal in advance then I'll almost always visit a couple of websites to see if I can get hold of any money saving vouchers to make that meal just a little bit more pleasurable! Certainly during this penny pinching age these sorts of sites seem to be cropping up all over the place and there is certainly no shortage in them at the moment!

One of my most recent discoveries is the Restaurant Vouchers website where the name of the actual website pretty much gives away what it's all about. Restaurant Vouchers is a sub branch of the Invitation Book website which advertises itself as the home of entertainment and leisure savings. The company was set up back in 2003 and runs in nine different regions of the UK, although Restaurant Vouchers does not seem to be limited by location in any way. Invitation Book has published a book in nine areas of the UK, each one tailored to that particular area, which are crammed full of money saving offers for that particular area.

The Restaurant Vouchers site was set up very recently in 2009 and is a site that I only discovered a couple of weeks ago. The homepage is quite bland looking in my opinion with a black background with limited brightly coloured areas at the top of the page and then the white central area advertising all the various restaurant vouchers available. At the top of the homepage is a link to submit a new voucher which will allow you to fill in a short form and provide a link to a voucher you've found. There is also a box opposite this link where you can enter your email address to receive free updates on new vouchers being added to the site.

Below this is the site name along with a search box whereby you can enter the name of a restaurant and search for any relevant vouches. This search facility is extremely straightforward and the results appear almost instantaneously. There are three further options on this menu type bar including the option to browse all restaurants where you can view all the restaurant logos with active vouchers on the site in a table style format, or alternatively you can select to view either the most recent vouchers on the site or the expiring soon vouchers on the site which will show you the most relevant ones depending on what you pick.

The main body of the homepage is devoted to the actual vouchers split into sections as to when they were added. For example at the top it currently says "Added in the Week Commencing: 15th June 2009" and then all the relevant vouchers are displayed below this. There are currently nineteen vouchers showing under this area, each voucher is displayed with the restaurant logo, the restaurant name, the offer, the date the offer expires and a little text area describing exactly what the offer entails, for example "Valid until the 28th June, get your hands on this 2 for One Strada Voucher. Simply enter your details to print your Strada Voucher."

To actually get hold of your voucher you need to click on the actual offer next to the restaurant logo and you will be taken directly to that voucher's homepage. Sometimes you'll be required to submit certain details such as name, email address, postcode, etc. to the actual restaurant site before being given access to the voucher. Sometimes the voucher will simply open and you can print it or on other occasions I've found the voucher can be emailed to you. Once an offer has expired it appears to be deleted from the site, hence why the site will never grow huge in size as there will never be that many offers at one time.

You can browse through all the different weeks showcased on the site to find offers from some time ago that are still active. I tend to browse through the most recent additions if I've a few minutes to spare or else I'll opt for the search function if I know where I want to go in particular. There is a good range of well known restaurants on the site, for example there are currently vouchers for Cafe Rouge Gourmet Burger Kitchen, La Tasca, O'Neills, Pizza Express, Strada and Zizzi. There are some restaurants on the site that I've never heard of although the majority of them do seem to be national and well known chains like Pizza Hut for example.

All the vouchers really do mean you'll receive quite a saving from taking advantage of them. I've never come across one where you'll save £1 or 5% or anything measly like that. The most popular voucher type seems to be two for one on main meals which can mean you'll save anything from a few pounds to over ten pounds depending what you have and where you go. There are also some other types of vouchers including a free glass of wine with a main meal, two pizzas and two bottles of wine for a certain price and fifty percent off your food bill. I'd say it's probably best going to have a nosy rather than just taking my word for it!

This site is really easy to use, the set up of it is very straightforward and takes under a minute to get used to it and find your way around. It's also quite small in terms of size; there are only a couple of different pages to the site although there are many links to external sites. I find the search function really easy to use and the results appear really quick - in fact the whole site is really easy to navigate and also really quick to load too. In fact in terms of site functionality and layout there really aren't any negative points at all, even a complete internet novice would be able to find an appropriate voucher in fewer than two or three minutes I reckon!

I would definitely recommend this site to anyone who visits the type of restaurants I mentioned previously, there are also many other fast food restaurants such as Burger King and takeaways such as Dominos that are represented on the site but just don't have any active vouchers at the moment. Although many of the vouchers will be found on numerous other sites on the internet this one is devoted solely to restaurants meaning they have a really good selection and you don't need to spend time browsing to find the appropriate category. I'd give it five stars out of five and just hope that the number and range of vouchers keeps growing!

Thanks for reading.

Summary: A site offering up to date money off vouchers for restaurant chains.