• Restaurant.com

Restaurant.com

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Overview

Restaurant.com has a rating of 1.2 stars from 864 reviews, indicating that most customers are generally dissatisfied with their purchases. Reviewers complaining about Restaurant.com most frequently mention gift card, customer service, and minimum purchase problems. Restaurant.com ranks 337th among Restaurants sites.

  • Service
    107
  • Value
    107
  • Shipping
    48
  • Returns
    74
  • Quality
    93
Positive reviews (last 12 months): 0%
Positive
0
Neutral
0
Negative
21
17
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How would you rate Restaurant.com?
Top Positive Review

“Up to 50% off on a meal, once a month per restaurant. Read the rules.”

Paul G.
12/9/15

So you see all these bad reviews of Restaurant.com. I took advantage of a great deal. 100 - $50 cards for $500 from Citi Easy Deals. That $4500 of free food Just avoid these assumptions: 1) It's not off any restaurant. Get a Visa Gift Card if you want that. Enjoy your fees. 2) It's not a free meal. It's up to half off the total bill. You can use the remainder elsewhere. 3) It's one use per restaurant per month. Not getting 1/2 price sushi every weekend. Goto a different restaurant tomorrow. 4) You have to log into the app to find the card to redeem. Yes it shows your name. Got to log in anyway. That bugs me! Lose one Star. 5) Let the server tap the screen to redeem. You will hit one of these the first time through. After that it's discount city. Got my food budget in line through some hard times.

Top Critical Review

“A scam”

richard t.
11/1/24

The entire experience was a scam in conjunction with a travel service. Was promised $100 in Restaurant coupons for attending sales presentation. Spent hours on the phone, with email, and online trying to obtain four $25 restaurant certificates. Never received any certificates and gave up.

Reviews (864)

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Reviews that mention popular keywords

gift card (158) customer service (125) gift certificate (113) credit card (32) phone number (19)
Thumbnail of user aprils2
New Jersey
1 review
3 helpful votes
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May 5th, 2011

RIP OFF! Sounds like a great deal, but it's not until AFTER you confirm your purchase that all these crazy restrictions pop up like "100.00 minumim to use certificate" I bought these as a gift! Not a great gift telling someone they have to spend 50.00 in order to use the 50.00 giftcard. How is that a deal? Also excludes alcohol, holidays, and a whole bunch of other nonscense! Stay away from this site!

Thumbnail of user chuckw9
Michigan
2 reviews
12 helpful votes
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September 28th, 2014

"Won" $125 in restaurant.com gift cards bidding on them on the Verizon Smart rewards program, when I received them I signed up (made an account) on restaurant.com, then entered my gift card numbers and the money disappeared, it said I had $25 credit on account when I entered that card, then said I had $100 on account when I entered that card? I thought 25 + 100 = 125? Then I tried to purchase some coupons for a local restaurant and they asked for a credit card! Where did the $125 go?

Tip for consumers:
VZW Smart rewards users, DO NOT BID ON RESTAURANT.COM GIFT CARDS>>> AVOID RESTAURANT>COM

Thumbnail of user patrickc80
California
1 review
6 helpful votes
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August 2nd, 2016

Bought a certificate for a restaurant that my wife loves. Two weeks later I get an email stating that particular restaurant is no longer accepting the certificates. So be it, I will get a refund. Wrong, I was told by an Alex that they do not give refunds and I can only get a certificate for a different restaurant. I told him if I wanted the other restaurants I would have bought them but only bought from restaurant I did try and buy. This is a complete rip off. I asked him what is stopping them from listing cheap certificates to nice restaurants and then once they sold enough to just cancel it and make everyone now use that money for the restaurants that aren't selling. I believe this was a setup all along. I asked for a supervisor, which of course I was told they are all busy. They wanted to have one call me back but I told them I would wait on hold for as long as it took... half hour and they keep checking back but saying still not available. Will wait this out on principle alone

Thumbnail of user emirh112
Florida
1 review
5 helpful votes
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March 26th, 2018

Bought gift cards I thought I could use at restaurants but it turns out it is only to buy certificates from their site. The way it was advertise to me was very deceiving and did not make this clear. Only after receiving a detailed explanation and reading it a few times did it make sense. This was deceptive and shady.

Thumbnail of user rd29
Oregon
1 review
1 helpful vote
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March 1st, 2014

Drove to another City to use my certificate to learn that as of March 1st the restaurant no loger accepts the certificates and that I had to contact restaurant.com for a refund. The owner hinted the company is going out of business. I would recommend not buying any new certificates and try and spend any ones you have asap!

Thumbnail of user loup22
Rhode Island
2 reviews
5 helpful votes
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July 19th, 2016

Got this gift card from my local Bj's club for renewing my membership. The girl who gave it to me said it was very simple to use. Followed the instruction on the card itself which was simple however I did not know I had to select a restaurant from a list. Ok so I go through the list a saw a restaurant that was mentioned by a few friends and family as a great place but I could not use my certificate because they were out. It said to check back often. So that's what I've been doing for 6 months! I finally sent an email to restarants.com about the issue but got no response. I'm puzzled. I have a $50 certificate to use but cant use it because the restaurant is out of certificates? I didn't pay for it and im glad because I will warn all friends and family not to fall for this scam. I also plan to inform my local BJ's club about it.

Thumbnail of user judyr154
Virginia
1 review
3 helpful votes
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February 10th, 2019

Check ahead to make sure restaurant still honors, website is persnickety, customer service meh. I use them when I travel, for an adventure out of my an a few local places in my neighborhood. Some of them ARE very nice quaint restaurants.

Thumbnail of user fredh152
New Mexico
1 review
0 helpful votes
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November 24th, 2018

I got a Restaurant.com certificate as a reward for a program some years ago. It was $25, and I used it. (Had to spend $50 to do so.) Thought it was a great deal.
I purchased $100 worth of Restaurant.com certificates later, I used $10, and the rest disappeared. No response. It's a scam

Thumbnail of user tims224
California
1 review
6 helpful votes
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April 2nd, 2018

I can no longer login to my account & use my credits (for what limited use they had to being with). Customer service is non-existent. This program was pretty scammy to begin with, but now it's just downright fraudulent. Oh yeah...& check with the restaurant before you plan to use it... many say they disenrolled, but were never removed from the website.

Thumbnail of user christophere25
New Jersey
1 review
4 helpful votes
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July 12th, 2016

I had a $25 gift certificate, once I entered the code it said I only had $10 to use. Never used it before. I didn't feel like making an issue of it so I chose a restaurant to use the $10 at. All of a sudden the credit is missing from my account. It just disappeared and I didn't get to actually use it. This is probably the worst site I've ever dealt with.

Thumbnail of user johnnyw10
Illinois
1 review
0 helpful votes
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July 23rd, 2013

The site is a total pain to use, it takes a while to find the restaurant you want and then once you find the restaurant it is even harder to buy the certificates because their account system is so horrible. I guess I got a good deal when I actually used the certificate, but now I have $100 in certificates. They only come in $5 increments for any of the good places you want to go and you can only use them once a month. It is really debatable whether or not the deal is worth the total pain of using their site and their god awful system of printing $5 certificates.

Thumbnail of user keemar
New York
1 review
6 helpful votes
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December 9th, 2015

I brought the coupons for two places that happened to be near my area. The first place was a ghost town where the only thing they made was tamales in corn husk and they didn't speak English. The roaches had to translate... lmao. The second business was respectable and told me that they no longer work with the site because they were not getting paid and they were giving away more food than making revenue. SCAM SCAM

Thumbnail of user alicep6
California
1 review
1 helpful vote
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October 21st, 2012

I've been using restaurants.com for almost 4 years. I have never had a problem redeeming the certificates. A few restaurants I bought certs for went out of business and I got an e-gift card which basically credit towards buying another cert.
Over the years I must have bought about 25 certs... not one problem.

Thumbnail of user lesm12
New York
2 reviews
8 helpful votes
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September 19th, 2014

I have used the vouchers for several sucessfully. In the past year I have had nothing but trouble trying to use vouchers that the restaurant won't take. Not only that but the company conveniently removed their 800 # from the site. My guess is that were bombarded with complaints. I'm through using this. Site.

Thumbnail of user tonyc306
New Jersey
1 review
4 helpful votes
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March 20th, 2019

0 stars. Restaurants are visible on the website, but not on the app. Trying to redeem on the app seems impossible. You have to select the restaurant you want to use the gift card at in the app but they are not there as they were on the website. Went to the restaurant that was listed on the website and they said they don't accept it. Dude on the phone at Restaurants.com offered me a $150 card for $20, and they never expire. WOW what a deal when you can't even use it. This appears to me to be some type of scam. The card I have was a promo for buying something, so I'm not too mad that it is worthless but I wasted 2 hours of my life on this. My brother lives in another state and there are no decent places to use it there either.

Thumbnail of user as1690
California
1 review
4 helpful votes
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June 20th, 2014

Can I rate 0? This site is full of scams and traps. So I bought a 25$ coupon and gifted one to my friend(my biggest fault). I asked restaurant owner to deliver food at my home and he refused to accept the gift card. He started to give excuses and asked me to use the coupon by coming for dinning or take out. This was bizzare. I called restaurant.com customer service and they did not bother a bit about it. I think restaurant.com is one of the best service I have ever used. Not at all recommended.

Thumbnail of user rakhid6
Maryland
1 review
3 helpful votes
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August 23rd, 2023

Nevr buy their certificates/coupons. They never work. Just a waste of money. When you ask for refund, they respond very late, name sake phone number, no one asnwers back.
They give excuses to refund the money. For my order numbers, they are making it up the price and refunding 40% of the money. When i tried to give the proof by logging in to the account, they wiped all the certificates i bought. Please dont do business with these guys.Scammers.

Products used:
coupons

Service
Value
Shipping
Returns
Quality
Thumbnail of user julianneg1
New York
1 review
6 helpful votes
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April 9th, 2015

Sometimes coupons work, sometimes they don't. Restaurant.com does not respond to any inquiries, even repeated inquiries, and complaints are not responded to at all. There is no way to actually call them, you can only email, and they do not respond. FAIL.

Thumbnail of user lisac773
Alabama
2 reviews
0 helpful votes
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December 4th, 2018

I purchased two certificates. The first one I used (Dunn's Food Market in Alabama) had never seen the certificate before but honored it anyway (Thank You, Dunn's!) The second (Mary's Kitchen in Florida) refused to accept it and told me they had never authorized the certificate to be advertised on restaurant.com and have no idea how it ended up there. That was fine, mistakes happen. However, I went to exchange the certificate on the site. After trying, I received a notice saying I was not able to exchange at this time and to try again later. I went back to the site later and the certificate was COMPLETELY removed from my account making it impossible to exchange! Stay away! I agree with others; it is a total scam!

Thumbnail of user michaels233
Florida
1 review
6 helpful votes
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January 18th, 2015

This is horrible; they are making $ off of selling discount gift "referral" cards. The restaurant has hopes of increasing customer traffic. The recipient is inconvenienced with having to look for restaurants on the website. The restaurants all want you to spend 50% of the value of the gift "referral" card. In other words, mine was $100, and the restaurants want me to spend $50. A gift cad does not work that way. I should be able to choose where i want to go; or at least go where the gift card states and not be FORCED to spend any $$ if i don't want to.

Service
Value
Thumbnail of user bingab
Minnesota
1 review
0 helpful votes
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December 21st, 2013

Don't waste your time trying to redeem your certificate. Straight up scam. Got this via a promo to subscribe to the Minneapolis Star Tribune newspaper. The newspaper should be embarrassed that it was associated with this scam.

Thumbnail of user karenw29
New York
1 review
1 helpful vote
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September 29th, 2013

DO NOT PURCHASE SPECIAL DEALS! I have been a member of restaurant.com since 2007. We purchased 2 broadway tickets from a "deal" which came with a $50 restaurant.com e-gift card. We paid $116 for each deal. When we received the tickets, the face value read $99. The e-gift cards cannot be used for any special deals(i. E $4 for a $25 certificate). A $50 gift card can only buy a certificate for $50! If I purchased a $50 deal as I usually do, I could pay as little as $8. That would make the value of the deal, if I purchased my ticket directly from the theater, $107. I got cheated out of $9 per ticket deal. This is no discount.

Thumbnail of user charleneandh
Idaho
1 review
13 helpful votes
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December 5th, 2017

While this may be a decent deal for the consumer, it's an awful deal for the restaurant! We've used several in our town, and each time the staff (including managers and OWNERS!) have never even heard of restaurant.com. These restaurant owners have not given permission for these coupons to be used, yet they have to take them from the consumer or risk losing their business. That's called THEFT! I thought these were a good deal until I found out the restaurant.com was using me to steal from local restaurant owners. AWFUL AWFUL AWFUL dirty business practices

Thumbnail of user dennisj10
Missouri
1 review
1 helpful vote
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December 4th, 2013

Have tried for the last 3 days to send there E gift card and site has been down. Have purchased the card and unable to get any response from the site. With Christmas less than 3 weeks away was a great idea and unable to complete.

Thumbnail of user cindye10
Virginia
1 review
4 helpful votes
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October 16th, 2015

My experience with Restaurant.com has been horrible. Purchased restaurant certificates only to find that restaurants have gone out of business. Have shown up at restaurants only to find out they no longer accept their certificates. Have tried to access my account to print certificates only to find that site experiencing difficulties. Trying to get help from them to resolve issues next to impossible. Stay away.

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