When you go to a spa or a salon, you expect to have a relaxing, invigorating experience, and to leave feeling refreshed and calm. As with all things though, sometimes your expectations aren’t met. So what can you do if your salon session turns into a nightmare, or your spa trip isn’t what you expected?
The Salon’s Gone
Ok, so it can be great to receive a gift voucher for a spa or salon treatment, and you will probably put it away until you have the opportunity to plan your pamper day. What can you do if by the time you ring to make the appointment, they have gone?
Firstly, make sure that the voucher is in date. Most of them expire after a certain time, and when that time is up, the spa or salon won’t be obliged to redeem it. Unfortunately, if your salon has gone out of business before your spa voucher has been redeemed, the chances of getting a refund or any compensation are minimal. Once a company has gone into liquidation, you can only claim money from them if they have enough funds available – and this is quite unlikely.
Do The Job Properly!
In general, any treatment that you have in a spa or a salon is a service according to the Supply of Goods and Services Act 1982. This Act covers any service you buy, whether it’s a blissful (or not so blissful) massage or a washing machine repair. You’re entitled to expect any service you pay for to be carried out with ‘reasonable care and skill’ for a start. This is means that, for example, the therapist waxing your legs should know what she is doing, and you’ll know for sure if she doesn’t!
If you’re not happy with the way your treatment has been carried out, you should speak to your therapist, and the spa or salon manager. There is usually a way of resolving the problem amicably. If, for example, your nail extensions start to peel away a few days after you’ve had them done, you’re well within your rights to ask for the nails to be done again. If this isn’t possible, or the salon won’t play ball, you could ask for a full or partial refund to get the work done elsewhere. This tends to be harder to do amicably, so if this happens and you can take a photo of the work before it was rectified elsewhere, do so, as you might end up having to pursue a refund through the court system.
It Does What it Says On The Box
Another issue you need to be aware of is that by law, any service or goods that you pay for have to be ‘as described.’ So if you hand over your credit card to pay for a 90 minute massage and body treatment and the therapist is hanging up her gloves after an hour, you would have every right to point at the spa treatment menu and ask for a refund to cover the missing 30 minutes.
If you have a tanning treatment that is described as ‘lasts up to 14 days’ and it’s disappeared after three, or a body wrap that promises an inch loss of up to two inches when there’s been absolutely zero difference on the tape measure you could also feasibly return to the salon and ask for another attempt.
The trouble is that a lot of the descriptions of beauty treatments are fluffy and vague. You can’t always quantify ‘relaxing’ or ‘pampering’ so it’s hard to complain about a massage not being relaxing enough, or a body scrub not being invigorating. The main thing is that you should always feel that you’ve got what you’ve paid for with any beauty treatment – a visit to a spa or salon is supposed to be a treat and not a trial.
