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UK Experience Day Price Comparisons
Activity Superstore Argos London Theatre Direct NationWide Paintball Play Red Letter Days Thruxton Virgin Experience DaysWhen we set up this site we had to make a lot of decisions about what we would include and what we would not include.
One of the things we hate about price comparison sites is how little information they pack onto the screen. We decided to focus on providing tables of experience days with prices, hand coded against themes and categories, and with geographic information so you can find experience days that are the right sort of thing at the right price in the right place. Once you've narrowed down the field, you can get all the other information you need from the merchants own websites.
Another way of putting this is: there's so much diatribe and repetition on the web we decided to just present the information that is uniquely available from us rather than 'copy and paste' other stuff that's available elsewhere.
In a word, No, but to explain further it depends on quite what you mean by going direct.
You could go direct to the merchant (e.g. Red Letter Days) but you will find the prices you see here are the exactly the same. We are paid commission on any sales but these commissions are the standard sales commission that the merchants either pay to third-party sellers or keep themselves to fund their own advertising campaigns and to pay commission to their in-house sales staff.
You will find NO price difference between the prices here and the ones on the merchants website.
You could try to track down the experience day provider and see if they do direct selling themselves but this is usually a bad idea for a few reasons.
A lot of experience day providers don't sell direct, as they don't want to employ sales staff and mess around with all the retail sales issues such as packaging, credit card processing and occasional complaints from disgruntled comsumers.
If the experience day provider does sell direct, the quality of the pack received through the post will probably not be as good as packs you might get from the established merchants. This is particularly important if it's a gift.
If you (or the person you are giving to) change your mind about the experience you want to do, most of the merchants allow you to swap to another experience. If you buy direct from a provider, they MIGHT be willing to refund you but they aren't going to arrange an alternative for you.
Just as the merchants keep their own sales commissions, so do the experience day providers. Their prices will be the same as the merchants and the same as the prices available here. The merchants make their margin by block booking in bulk and we make our margin through sales commissions. Unless you want 100 spa days to be taken within the next 6 months or you are willing to set up a business and negotiate a contract with the merchants as an outsourced sales provider then there's probably no savings you can make.
The only exception to this is where a merchant has block-booked a set of experiences from a certain provider, and then has trouble selling them. In this case they may DISCOUNT the experience day below the original intended sale price and below the price that other people sell it at (including the experience day providers themselves). Of course if this is the case, the merchant notifies us by e-mail and we update our prices ready for when the discount comes into force. So this is an example of when you better off NOT trying to go direct!
P.S. You may not believe us (after all, we're just some company on the internet!). We're not offended. Please go and independently check but, once you've found we have the best prices here, please come back to www.FindExperienceDays.com and then go to the merchants site using one of our links so we get the commission that, to be fair, we have earnt.
The answer to this is 'mostly'. There are a couple of possible reasons why we may not list an experience day.
Sometimes we decide not to list a particular product. Some merchants promote experience days that we don't think are suitable for a family oriented site such as this. Others sell products other than experience days and we don't list those. For example, if a merchant also sells chocolates or other gift baskets we don't include them here as we are exclusively concerned with experience days.
Sometimes a new experience day is launched but the merchant doesn't give us enough notice to get the data ready. This only happens rarely but it is possible that newly launched experience days might not appear on our site until the following working day.
We currently list over 1,550 different experience days and we check for changes and update our databases and the website every working day (changes only tend to happen on working days) so you can rest assured that if it's available then we've probably got it covered.
