Converting Tesco’s Clubcard Reward Vouchers, the equivalent of cashback which you can get for shopping with them, into four times their face value in Eurotunnel Tokens is an attractive idea – in theory you can get your channel crossing for a quarter of what you would otherwise pay for it.

Crossing the Channel by Eurotunnel is a very comfortable and convenient for a motorcyclist – and the Bacon Butties at the Folkstone Terminal are nothing short of superb.  But booking a crossing using the credit on your Tesco Clubcard Rewards account is by no means straightforward.

There is a Catch 22 built into the system which makes it more or less impossible to take full advantage of the offer.  And if you’re booking only a few weeks before you want to travel, the delays which are built into the system make it virtually impossible to use because you either end up paying something like half of the cost of your crossing at full price or  all of it because your Tesco Eurotunnel Tokens simply won’t arrive in time to use them at all.

The reason for this is that although you can get a  price for your journey on line or on the phone from Eurotunnel and then immediately order the necessary Tokens from Tesco on line too, Eurotunnel will not accept a provisional booking until you have physically received the Tokens (by post) from Tesco.  At that stage you can make a provisional booking and get a firm price, and then you have to get the Tokens to them within their deadline of four days.  Special delivery is recommended by Eurotunnel in order to meet the deadline and in case they go astray) before your booking is confirmed.

Once you get this far, it's quick and easy to get to France

Tesco take up to five working days to dispatch the tokens (which they only just managed with mine, on the seventh day after I ordered them) so you might get them two or more days later, depending on what mood Royal Mail is in.  Tesco will not investigate Tokens which fail to arrive until 14 days after they were dispatched, so potentially three weeks after you ordered them; if they accept that they are lost in the post you will presumably have to wait at least another week for them to send replacements.

Once you physically receive your Tokens, you can phone Eurotunnel to make your provisional booking, which is accepted on the basis of the Token’s number, which you read to them over the phone -by which time, because of Eurotunnel’s “flexible” pricing policy, the cost of your journey is very likely to have gone up.  Eurotunnel charges more for a crossing the closer to the journey time that you book and in the final weeks and days before the journey the rate of price increase gets steeper.

If you are booking your crossing well ahead (say two or three months) the fare might not have changed by the time your Tokens arrive, so you might have enough Tokens to pay for it as planned.  Otherwise by the time you get the Tokens the price almost certainly will have gone up,  you won’t have enough Tokens to pay for your crossing, so you will be faced with making up the difference by paying full price for the difference.  If you delay to go back to Tesco to order more Tokens, you would inevitably be in the same sort of position again one week or more later when the extra Tokens arrived and you would be paying even more for your crossing.  Catch 22.

There doesn’t seem to be any reliable way to make the system work as advertised, i.e. to get your crossing for a quarter in face value of Tesco’s Clubcard Reward Points of what it would cost you by paying any other way, even if you plan well ahead.

Automated check in at the Terminal is quick and easy, booking a crossing using Tesco Tokens isn't

There is a system for claiming refunds of unused Eurotunnel Tokens from Tesco and you can buy extra Tokens in £10 increments to cover your estimate of Eurotunnel’s price increase while you wait, but there’s a Catch 22 built into that part of the system too.  You cannot claim a partial refund of a Token if you didn’t spend all of it.  So if you anticipate Eurotunnel’s inevitable price increase and add more than enough to cover what you think it might be,  Eurotunnel won’t give any change from the Tokens you use and Tesco will only refund whole Tokens, not partly used ones.  In order to even get close to achieving it you will need to order one Token to cover the fare quoted to you initially plus enough separate £10 Tokens to make up the estimated difference.

Even then you cannot pay for a Eurotunnel crossing entirely by using Tesco Tokens unless you round up with Tokens to the next £10 above whatever Eurotunnel finally charge you.  Potentially therefore you cannot avoid wasting up to £9.99 in Token value doing it this way.

And getting a refund on unused Eurotunnel Tokens is a pain.  You have to return them to Tesco with a covering letter and in due course, after they have processed the refund application, you will get your Clubcard Rewards Points (i.e. 25% of the face value of the Eurotunnel Token, re-credited to your Clubcard Account.  You might find yourself being advised, as Eurotunnel do when you send Token by post to them, to send your unused Tokens back to Tesco by recorded delivery.

In practice what you have to do to use the Tesco/Eurotunnel system without turning it into a laborious consumer crusade, is start the process well ahead of your travelling date, order enough Tokens to cover the anticipated cost of your journey, based on what you think Eurotunnel are likely to charge you when you actually get your Tokens, then pay the difference using your Debit or Credit Card.  At least Eurotunnel don’t currently impose punitive charges for using plastic to pay for journeys as Ryan Air infamously do.  Or at least not yet they don’t – and their excellent Bacon Butties are reasonably priced too, much cheaper than in a motorway service area.

There is some value to Eurotunnel in making the system cumbersome I suppose because they  either get to pocket the change from the Tokens or they get you to pay for at least some of the crossing at full price.   Eurotunnel will not accept Tokens for bookings within 14 days of intended travel and you cannot simply turn up at Check In and use them as cash.  That’s all understandable, Eurotunnel are offering their share of the discount for early bookings only.  You can’t use Tokens to book their premium “Flexi Plus” service either.

There is also value to Tesco in that some of people who over-order Tokens to make sure they can cover Eurotunnel’s price increase will either lose them or never get around to returning them for a refund.

But the other side of this coin is that both companies appear to be operating very expensive administration systems for the sake of these relatively modest gains.  Why, in this computer age, is it necessary or cost effective to require two lots of administrative action (with the possibility of more if there is a refund claim) and two postal journeys by the same pieces of paper to complete what is essentially a very simple financial transaction?

Eurotunnel's Bacon Butties are superb

Tesco’s computer already recognises the Clubcard Rewards Points voucher numbers as valid and as belonging to you immediately you enter their serial numbers when you place the order for Eurotunnel Tokens with them on line.  So Tesco’s computer does then presumably issue the Tokens without further human involvement, maybe not even when they are printed and placed inside an envelope – maybe not until they emerge from the mail sorting process in your local Royal Mail Sorting Office.  Why it has to take up to five working days for their computer to print and dispatch a piece of paper goodness only knows, but that is the performance target which Tesco set themselves for dispatching Eurotunnel Tokens.

Their performance target for investigating Tokens which fail to arrive in the post as promised is not to start the enquiry until at least fourteen days after dispatch.  If that’s a reflection of the confidence they have in their chosen carrier, wouldn’t you think they would change carriers?

It’s by no means obvious why Tesco’s computer couldn’t send an electronic equivalent of a Token directly to Eurotunnel’s computer as the order transaction (on line, with Tesco) is completed on line – a message would appear saying something like “your Tokens have been issued and sent to Eurotunnel, here is the reference number you will need to quote when you make your reservation for a crossing”.  Job done.

I suppose by doing it in a much slower and more cumbersome way they hang on to the money it bit longer; maybe that’s what’s behind all this.  I know that cock up is always supposed to be more likely that conspiracy but I worked for a big retailer once and they don’t do anything by accident and they don’t tolerate incompetence at any level for any longer than they need to spot it.   Surely then mighty Tesco aren’t inefficient in this way by neglect or incompetence?  Surely there must be some commercial reason for them to be operating an administrative system that’s less customer-friendly and less efficient, at least by my experience, than getting your Bus Pass issued by the Local Council?

With a little bit more computer programming effort by both companies you would think that Tesco’s computer could even hand you over to Eurotunnel’s to complete the booking process seamlessly in the same way you have been able to use PayPal to complete an EBay purchase for years, long before Ebay became the owners of PayPal.  It ain’t rocket science and surely the volume of these transactions must be high enough to warrant the effort involved, not least because of the savings in administrative costs which would be made.

In a way it’s puzzling that Tesco doesn’t take the initiative and use its considerable commercial muscle to require Eurotunnel to get its electronic act together, since Tesco appears to be carrying a very substantial unnecessary administrative burden by making the procedure so cumbersome.  I was told on behalf of Tesco that Eurotunnel insists on doing it this way, but I took that with a pinch of salt.

Bikers can pay extra for flexibility but they aren't allowed into the Lounge or to board early, they wait outside in the queue, even when it's raining

Anyway, despite lots of browsing and several long phone calls, much of which was spent listening to recorded messages and trying to remember complex menu options for long enough to press the right button once they’d finished, this is as close as I could get to understanding how the Tesco/Eurotunnel system works and getting it to allow me to make a booking on Eurotunnel.

I had two very nice chats with a young lady called Samantha who understood my problem and would have liked to help, but her hands were clearly tied by procedure.  Oh and I sent an email.  After a great deal of persistence on the website to unearth how to send an email to Tesco’s Customer Service I did so and received, within a few hours, an automatic acknowledgement saying “I just want to let you know that your email has successfully reached us, and we promise to be back in touch as soon as possible.” Ten days later I’m still waiting for a substantive reply, and of course for my Tokens.

Somewhere out there, comfortably remote from contact with actual customers, both Tesco and Eurotunnel are likely to employ someone quite senior as their “Head of Customer Experience” or its equivalent.  This isn’t, as you might first think, the person who  determines the softness of the toilet paper in the loo; he or she is responsible for helping the Company to get the balance right between reducing costs (and therefore maximising profit in the short term) yet keeping customers wanting to come back to yield continuing profit in the future.  Frustrating and/or irritating customers is recognised these days as having a potentially important commercial downside.  For example insurance companies balance very carefully how much they might save by rejecting claims more vigorously against how much they will then lose in renewal premiums.

Hopefully one or other of Tesco or Eurotunnel’s Head of Customer Experience rides a Goldwing (or slightly more plausibly their Dad does!) and comes across this Article.  Maybe they might then do something to improve this seemingly wasteful and frustrating system.

Meanwhile I’m still hoping my Eurotunnel Tokens will arrive in tomorrow’s post.  Funny that Tesco can deliver stuff you order on line from their store within a day or two but not a piece of paper.  I bought a little plastic thing on EBay from Hong Kong for £1.30 recently and that arrived quicker than these Tokens.  At least as the author of this Blog I can pound the keyboard sound off about the frustrations of waiting for my Tokens while I’m doing so; it’s now Day Ten and they still haven’t arrived.

Postscript:

Day 11 after I ordered them on line, the Tokens arrived by post from Tesco accompanied by several sheets of papers explaining the rules and procedures and a form to fill in.  The Tokens are dated (and were presumably printed) on Day 4 but it took until Day 7 for them to be dispatched and then four more days for them to arrive – marked (but not date stamped) as DHL Global Mail although actually delivered to our house by Royal Mail.  Still no sign of a reply to my email from Tesco.

Day 14 – I have made a provisional booking with Eurotunnel by telephone (cannot be done on line) and (since it’s still 21 days to my planned departure and I was able to switch to a cheaper departure time slot) the fare had gone up by only £6, so I was lucky.  I now have to fill in Tesco’s form (which repeats everything I told Eurotunnel on the phone) and post it with the Tokens to Eurotunnel.  I must get them to Eurotunel within 4 days, so Special Delivery is recommended, otherwise the booking lapses.  Eurotunnel will then, at long last, confirm the booking to me – by email!

The overall cost of my Eurotunnel booking (including the extra £6 and £5.05 for Special Delivery but excluding the cost of calling Eurotunnel on their 0844 telephone number) was therefore £46.05.  This is 31% more than the quarter fare which the system theoretically offers.

I don’t want to sound ungrateful; £46 is of course a very cheap crossing and I’m still only paying 33% of what Eurotunnel would have charged me if I had not used Tesco system.

Day 16 – Eurotunnel’s Confirmation of Booking arrived by email.

Still no sign of a reply to my email to Tesco; I wonder if I will get one.