In the last few days train booking website RedSpottedHanky.com have been emailing people who took part in their Fantasy Formula One competition (see the original post here) annoucing they are going to award the points by 10th January 2014 – rather than in late 2013 as originally planned. Becasue RSH loyalty points are (supposed) to expire at the end of the calendar year, the F1 points will remain valid for redemption conversions for a longer period.

If you are converting your 2013 loyalty earnings, perhaps from the Wimbledon game, into RSH e-vouchers – it suddenly occured to me there is something important to point out about how RSH lets you spend e-vouchers.

Red Spotted Hanky loyalty points statement

Converting your loyalty points (above) into e-Vouchers (below) note that the conversion process takes an overnight from the redemption debit until they are showing in your account as e-Vouchers and available for spending.

RSH list of e-vouchers in account

Now the tip: Break any decent loyalty points balance into some small chunks (£5, £10, etc) for RSH e-voucher redemptions, even if you convert the whole balance into multiple e-Vouhcers straight after each other.

RSH lets you use multiple vouchers against a single booking, so you don’t loose out (and you can also top up any shortfall with cash).

But, while you can select multiple e-vouchers (and choose wich ones) the website will try to use the FEWEST of the selected vouchers that will cover the entire booking amount – irrespective of voucher expiry date!

So, if you selected vouchers with balances of £23.71 and £10.00, and you try to make a booking for £12.50, it will take all of the amount from the £23.71 voucher becasue that will cover it on its own (reducing the balance on that voucher to £11.21) – irrespective of whether the £10.00 vouhcer had an earlier expiry date than the £23.71 vouhcer.

During 2013 there have been oportunities to collect promotional £10 e-vouchers from newspapers and other sources, but these have had short expiry dates (month or so, etc).

If you had converted a large loyalty points balance into a single voucher, with value of say £67.83, and then a short dated promotional vouhcer comes along for £10.00, if your transaction value is over £10.00, but less than the remaining value on your big voucher (say it is a £14.50 transaction), there is no way to spend the short dated £10.00 voucher on this transaction without using cash for the balance.

Not only does that mean you are not using up your big voucher, but you are using cash on RSH – and there are better cashback paying train booking websites for cash transactions.

If however, you convert any big loyalty balance into some small £5.00 and £10.00 vouchers, you can then select one of thouse beside the promotional £10.00 voucher, and since neither will cover the demption ammount on its own, it is forced to use them both.

When it comes to debiting the vouchers, RSH seems to prioritise completely using up a voucher before expiry dates. And using the fewest vouchers. With all things being equial, (voucher balances) it then seems to go by expiry dates. That is my experiecne anyway.

Don’t forget the ongoing RSH fantasy football game – not too late to start!

See the post here. I’m currently up a good few pounds from this despite not touching my team – because I know nothing about football!

E&OE.