My wife and I have 4 gift cards (Village Cinemas, Hoyts, a Garden Centre, and a Shopping Centre) that were given to us in 2019, all before the 3 year expiry period came into force on 1 Nov 2019: https://consumerlaw.gov.au/new-gift-card-laws
These cards were gifts purchased by friends and family, not promos or freebies and weren’t for cancelled events.
Normally I would say these cards have all expired. However, because of the Covid restrictions here in Melbourne we were in the situation where we couldn’t make use of those cards for most of last year.
Contact the gift cardholder and request that the expiry be extended (or new cards reissued). It is likely that they will be sympathetic since COVID didn’t allow cinema goers to enjoy movies in the theatre.
I was cleaning up last year at home and found a Coles /Myer group gift card had fallen down the back of some drawers. The card had a 2015 expiry and was to a significant value. I took it to a local K-mart and asked at the service desk. The lady was quite helpful and explained that if I went to the website and submitted a brief account of what had happened that it was at the discretion of the person receiving the complaint as to wether it would be honoured!
So I did thinking nothing of it after pressing send. 2 days later I recieved a reply advising the same card NOW had been extended for 3 months and would be honoured!
I had the Same texperience with a major shopping centre…They also honoured it!
I wonder if this is possibly due to not being able to verify the authenticity or validity of the cards…due to the 18 years since they were issued. Most businesses keep transaction records for 5 years, so the data associated with the cards may have been purged from their system.
Some cards also work as a debit card where money can be used until the residual value becomes zero. If they have purged their records (which is highly likely due to the timeframe), they won’t know if the cards have their full face value or zero monies left on the card (or somewhere in between).