A customer was dining at a restaurant which purportedly had a 50% dine-in discount offer on the foodpanda app.
However, when she tried to redeem the discount, it couldn’t be found on the app — to both the customer’s and staff’s surprise.
In the end, she had to pay full price.
When she questioned foodpanda’s customer service, she appeared to get no resolution, instead being switched between different staff, all of whom were unable to answer her queries.
A foodpanda spokesperson told MS News on Tuesday (24 Oct) that the offer was temporarily unavailable due to an app update at the time of the customer’s redemption.
The company has since reached out to the customer to offer compensation.
On 20 Oct at around 5pm, Natasha, who declined to give her full name, went to FuFu Pot at Plaza Singapura for a meal.
She said that foodpanda had a dine-in promo of 50% on the app for the restaurant at the time, and so chose to eat there.
“I showed the fufupot staff [the promo] and asked them whether it was available to redeem,” she said. “They promptly said yes and seated me, informing me that it is only valid for a la carte items. As such, I only ordered ala carte items, coming up to a bill of S$74.”
When it was time to pay, Natasha and her dining companion went to the counter. However, they discovered that the promotion was no longer on the foodpanda app.
“This left us with no choice, as after checking for five minutes, together with the staff, we all realised that foodpanda took away the promotion suddenly,” Natasha said.
Image provided by Natasha
She added that the staff then kindly helped them to change an item to the promotional price so that they could get a slight discount, even after ordering a la carte.
However, she still found the “disappearance” of the promo “disturbing”. So, she wrote to foodpanda’s customer support asking for an explanation.
“I wrote in to foodpanda to obtain an explanation, and hopefully a discount, since the only reason why I ate there was because of the discount,” Natasha shared.
But what happened next shocked her.
“Foodpanda’s help centre staff did not attempt to provide me with an explanation, but abruptly ended my chat,” she said. “This occurred in my subsequent attempts at trying to clarify the situation with different help centre staff.”
Screenshots of the conversation seen by MS News show that the chat support could not answer her queries.
Image provided by Natasha
Subsequently, they noted they’ll forward her feedback to the “relevant team”.
Image provided by Natasha
The conversation then ended.
When Natasha tried to start another conversation, it once again ended with no explanation.
Image provided by Natasha
Following the experience, Natasha wanted to warn others of the potential for the app to simply remove the dine-in promotion mid-meal.
In response to media queries by MS News, a foodpanda spokesperson said the dine-in discount at FuFu Pot was temporarily unavailable due to an app update on the evening of 20 Oct.
This was the same time that the customer was redeeming the discount.
“We have reached out to the customer to offer compensation,” the spokesperson added.
Checks by MS News on 26 Oct show that the offer for FuFu Pot is currently on foodpanda. However, the offer is for a 15% discount.
Mishaps when using apps are sadly not uncommon. Just recently, several DBS customers were unable to pay for their food on Saturday (14 Oct) when an outage affected digital banking and payment services.
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Featured image provided by Natasha.
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