A gift card is one of the best sales a venue can make. The money arrives up front, and a few weeks later someone new walks through the door holding a reason to visit. This summer we rebuilt the gift card system end to end, and the result touches every part of the journey: buying, giving, spending, and everything you see behind the scenes.
Here's what's new.
Gift cards that live in your guest's phone
Every gift card can now be added to Apple Wallet and Google Wallet, straight from the recipient's email or the card's balance page. The pass carries your venue's name, colours and card artwork, so it looks like yours, not ours.
The best part is that the pass keeps itself up to date. When a guest spends £18.50 of a £50 card at dinner, the pass in their pocket quietly updates to show £31.50 remaining. Expiry dates are on there too. No more forwarding the original email around or asking staff to look a balance up — the card is just there, next to their boarding passes and loyalty cards.
Guests can also check any card's balance on this page whenever they like — it shows the card's artwork, how much has been spent, what's left, and exactly how long it's valid.
Schedule a gift for the right morning
Organised people buy birthday presents early. Until now, buying a gift card a week before the birthday meant it arrived a week before the birthday.
When a buyer chooses "Send as a gift", they can now pick the delivery date. They pay immediately and get their receipt, and the recipient's email is held back until the morning of the day they chose, in your venue's timezone. The order sits in your sales history with a Scheduled badge, and there's a Send now button if plans change.
A gift card you can wrap
Some gifts want to be handed over, not forwarded. Buyers can now order a printed gift card at checkout and have it sent out in the post, ready to slip inside a birthday card or sit under the tree. An email is a fine way to move money about. It is a poor thing to unwrap.
The card is printed on heavy 250GSM stock and carries the same artwork the buyer chose on screen, so the card that lands on the doormat matches the one they were shown at checkout.
Cards go out by Royal Mail, first or second class, picked by the buyer at checkout. Postage is charged at cost, £2.95 for first class and £1.95 for second, and the buyer pays it as part of their order. The whole thing is handled by BookingNinja: we print the card, we post it, and if the mail misplaces one, replacing it is our problem rather than yours.
Every physical order appears on the new Delivery Status page in your gift card dashboard, so you can see at a glance what has been dispatched and what is still on its way.
Physical delivery is switched on per card. Open Gift Card Products, go into the card's settings, and allow physical delivery. Cards without it behave exactly as they always have.
A smoother way to buy
The guest purchase flow has had a polish pass of its own. Buyers can add several cards in one order with a quantity stepper, offer a "choose your own amount" card with limits you set, and pick from your card designs when a product allows it. Each card in the order gets its own code, its own artwork and its own personal message on delivery.
A proper home in the admin
Gift Cards now has its own section of the sidebar, organised the way you actually work: products you sell, cards in circulation, insights, and configuration.
The products page shows each card you offer with its total value sold, spent, outstanding and expired, plus headline numbers for the whole programme at the top. Creating a comped card for a competition winner or an apology is two clicks away under Generate & Send, and the designer comes with over a dozen ready-made card templates you can drop your logo onto.
Every card tells its whole story
Search for any code and you land on its details page: initial value, total spent, remaining balance and expiry, the buyer and recipient with their gift message, and a full transaction history for that specific card. You can add credit, record a spend, extend the card's life, or resend it to the recipient from the same screen.
That transaction history matters more than it looks. When a guest rings up insisting their card "should have more on it", the answer is right there: when it was loaded, where it was spent, and what's left.
Sales history that answers the phone call
The sales page shows every order the way your team needs it during a phone call: who bought it, who it was for, the gift message, each generated code with its value and remaining balance, and a resend button per order. Scheduled gifts wear their badge so nobody panics that "the voucher hasn't arrived" nine days before it's supposed to.
Know how the programme is doing
The statistics page gives you the numbers that matter: sales revenue, how much has been redeemed, utilisation rate, active cards with remaining balance, and value lost to expiry. Below that, a sales and redemptions trend, a breakdown by card type, and daily performance.
Gift card revenue is counted honestly throughout: the money counts when the card is sold, and redemptions are never double-counted as new income in your analytics.
Take gift cards at the till
Gift cards are now a payment method on the POS, alongside cash and card. Type in the code, and the balance comes off the card — with split payments handled naturally, so £20 on a gift card and £5 in cash just works. Refunding a till payment that was made with a gift card puts the money back on the card, and your X and Z reports show gift card takings as their own line.
Two tills can't double-spend the same code, and booking-only restrictions on a card are respected where they should be while staying out of the way at the bar.
Refund as store credit
Sometimes a booking has to be cancelled and refunded through no fault of anyone. Until now your only option was sending the money back to the guest's bank — and probably never seeing them again.
The booking card now offers a second path: refund as store credit. We mint a gift card for the amount on the spot and email it to the guest immediately. They're made whole the moment you click the button, and the money stays with your venue until they come back to spend it. Partial amounts work too, and the same pounds can never be refunded twice.
The small things that stop the phone ringing
A few quieter changes that pull their weight:
- Partial redemption on bookings. A card worth more than the booking keeps its remainder, and the guest sees the applied amount and what's left at checkout.
- Expiry reminder emails. Guests holding a card with balance get a nudge before it expires — 14 days by default, configurable per venue. You can also trigger your own automation when a card lapses unspent.
- Fairer expiry. Cards are valid through the whole of their final day in your timezone, and cards set to never expire genuinely never do.
- New automation triggers. Gift card sold, credited, spent and expired are all available as custom notification triggers, so you can wire up your own follow-ups.
- A full audit trail. Every change to your gift card configuration is recorded in the Activity Log, with who changed it, what changed, and one-click rollback.
Available now
Everything above is live in your account today under Gift Cards in the sidebar. Wallet passes appear automatically on the balance pages and emails of new and existing cards — there's nothing to switch on.
If you're not selling gift cards yet, it takes about ten minutes to create your first one, pick a design, and put the link on your website. The Christmas rush will thank you.
As always, tell us what you'd like to see next.