Selling Christmas entries as gifts when nothing can be transferred

What exactly cannot be done with a gifted entry?

It cannot be handed to another person as a transfer, the name on it cannot be changed after payment, and it cannot be moved to a different night or a different arrival time. This vertical does not resolve ticket transfer and nothing anywhere in the platform reschedules a booking, so there is no credit note and no administrative override in the console either.

What remains is a refund, available to the buyer from the link in their own confirmation email until the arrival slot starts, after which it is your decision. So the practical answer to "can you move us to Saturday?" is: refund, then rebook at whatever price is on sale — which is a worse deal for them if your ladder has stepped up since.

In practice the gate does not care whose name is on a booking, because a trail scans a code or a wristband rather than checking identity. Someone gifting an entry can simply forward the confirmation email. That works, and it is worth saying plainly rather than leaving people to guess.

Why is a gift card the better product for a present?

Because it moves the date decision to the person receiving it. A gift card is stored value bought from your trail and redeemed at checkout against a normal timed entry, so the recipient picks the night and the arrival time that suit them and the slot takes the inventory it should.

It is tender, not a discount. Your trail is credited the whole sale, the platform charges its fee on the sale exactly as it would on a card payment, and the value is carried as a liability from the moment it is bought until the moment it is redeemed. Only a hash of the code is stored, so nobody — including your own console — can read a card number back out, and a stolen database row is not spendable money.

If a booking paid for with a gift card is refunded later, the gift-card portion goes back onto the card rather than to somebody's bank, recorded on the order so it cannot be given back twice.

What should I put on my own website about gifts?

Two sentences, above the booking button, save most of the December support load. People buy the wrong thing in good faith, and they buy it six weeks before anybody notices.

• Say that entries are for a specific night and arrival time and cannot be moved or transferred afterwards.
• Say that a gift card is the right choice if the recipient should pick their own night.
• Say that a booking can be refunded by the buyer, from their confirmation email, up until the arrival slot starts.
• Say that the gate scans a code, not a name, so forwarding the confirmation email to the person going is fine.
• If you sell gift cards, link to them from the same place as the booking button — not from a separate page nobody finds in November.

What happens at the gate if the person who booked is not there?

Nothing unusual. The code in the confirmation email admits whoever presents it, and a wristband bound to the booking admits the same way, because the gate is scanning a credential rather than verifying an identity. No ID is checked and nothing compares a name.

The exception is the one that catches families out: a booking for more than one entry creates a place per entry, and a place nobody has named is refused at the gate. The person who booked is emailed a link to name them, and they can either fill the names in themselves or send each place to the person taking it. A gifted booking of four entries where nobody ever opened that email is four entries that do not admit.

If it happens anyway, your staff can find the visitor by name in the console and admit them by hand once the places are named — which is a queue-blocking two minutes on a cold night, so it is much better prevented than fixed.