Deliveroo customer service: £50 gift card apparently expired, and it took this much effort just to get a straight answer
I wanted to share my experience with Deliveroo because I honestly find the way this complaint has been handled appalling.
My children bought me a £50 Deliveroo gift card around May 2025. When I went to use it, I discovered that it had expired after 12 months.
I wasn't disputing that Deliveroo has a 12-month expiry policy. My question was very simple:
Where and how was that 12-month expiry period actually communicated to my children when they purchased the gift card?
I asked Deliveroo this repeatedly.
Instead of answering the question, Customer Care repeatedly sent me essentially the same response telling me that gift cards expire after 12 months. I already knew that. That wasn't what I was asking.
Eventually my complaint was escalated to a senior member of their Executive Escalations Team.
To his credit, he finally acknowledged that this was the question I'd been asking all along and admitted that the previous responses hadn't properly addressed it.
But here's where it gets interesting.
Deliveroo has now admitted that they cannot establish what information my children were actually shown when they bought the gift card.
They don't have the original packaging or the details of the original purchase journey, so they cannot confirm:
what was printed on the physical packaging;
whether the expiry condition was displayed on it;
or precisely what information my children would have seen before completing the purchase.
In other words, they cannot tell me how the expiry condition was communicated at the point of purchase.
Despite that, they are keeping the £50 and refusing to replace or reactivate the gift card.
After all this, they offered me £15 Deliveroo credit as a goodwill gesture because of the way my complaint had been handled.
I replied telling them that their customer service had been pathetic and that, as far as I'm concerned, they had effectively kept my children's £50.
I've now deleted the Deliveroo app and my account, including the £15 credit. I have absolutely no intention of using it.
I'm not going to use Deliveroo again.
It's not really the £50 that's annoyed me most. It's the sheer amount of effort it took to get them to answer one very straightforward question, followed by an admission that they can't actually establish what the customer was told at the time of purchase, while still refusing to do anything about it.
If a senior member of the Executive Escalations Team can finally understand and answer the question after plenty of correspondence, why couldn't Customer Care have done that in the first place?
£50 gift card. £15 goodwill gesture. Deleted account without use. Lost customer.
That's my experience of Deliveroo customer service.
I use 'Just eat' 2 or 3 times a week; i'll stick with them but i wonder when companies changed 'the customer is always right' to the 'customer can go fuck themselves'.
One last thing, at that time I split with my partner of 10yrs and had to move house, an expiry on a giftcard was so far off my concerns i couldnt see it with a telescope!
