Carnival Gift Cards - AARP

[pmatawan]

Just off the phone with aarp rewards about the gift cards sold without a pin. They said we should be getting an email offering a refund or a plastic card delivered through express mail. 

Edited October 4, 2019 by pmatawan
Typo

[Joe817]

Finally progress is being made! Thanks for the update!

[bury me at sea]

13 minutes ago, pmatawan said:

Just off the phone with aarp rewards about the gift cards sold without a pin. They said we should be getting an email offering a refund or a plastic card delivered through express mail. 

 

Thanks for posting this.  It may help relieve those who purchased the cards.

 

Did they say anything about offering real cards again?

[pmatawan]

They are sending out the plastic cards to resolve the no pin issue so maybe they will sell them again.

[bury me at sea]

17 minutes ago, pmatawan said:

They are sending out the plastic cards to resolve the no pin issue so maybe they will sell them again.

 

Thank you!

[pmatawan]

1 hour ago, pmatawan said:

They are sending out the plastic cards to resolve the no pin issue so maybe they will sell them again.

Well this info may be wrong. I just received an email with a link to a new Egift card with a PIN. Email was not from AARP, but arrived as a gift from an individual. Since it is for the same amount as the original gift card, I'm assuming it is a replacement....no other explanation was given.

Edited October 4, 2019 by pmatawan
Edit auto correct

[bury me at sea]

1 hour ago, pmatawan said:

Well this info may be wrong. I just received an email with a link to a new Egift card with a PIN. Email was not from AARP, but arrived as a gift from an individual. Since it is for the same amount as the original gift card, I'm assuming it is a replacement....no other explanation was given.

 

That's downright strange.

[Organized Chaos]

2 hours ago, pmatawan said:

Well this info may be wrong. I just received an email with a link to a new Egift card with a PIN. Email was not from AARP, but arrived as a gift from an individual. Since it is for the same amount as the original gift card, I'm assuming it is a replacement....no other explanation was given.

 

So it looks like they started mailing physical cards to some people first, then switched gears and told people the vendor would be emailing new e-cards. You should be good to go. You can go to Carnival's gift card site to check the balance: https://carnival.ourgiftcards.com/

 

AARP staff were telling people the physical cards would be rush shipped, but when people called the AARP Rewards customer service line, the CS reps. were telling them it could take up to 12 weeks to get them. Their customer service for the rewards programs is notoriously bad. It always has been since I joined Rewards for Good 2 1/2 years ago. I'm sure it's the exact same department now as it was then. I think it's because they use a third-party company to handle all the gift card orders, which leaves their own customer service in the dark much of the time. That and they probably don't care enough to thoroughly train that department since they don't actually take orders or handle the cards. So it's not much of a surprise that you got conflicting information.

[Joe817]

2 hours ago, pmatawan said:

Well this info may be wrong. I just received an email with a link to a new Egift card with a PIN. Email was not from AARP, but arrived as a gift from an individual. Since it is for the same amount as the original gift card, I'm assuming it is a replacement....no other explanation was given.

An individual???? That there would scare the bajeebers out of me! 

[pmatawan]

7 minutes ago, Joe817 said:

An individual???? That there would scare the bajeebers out of me! 

betty weinkle sent me the gift card on behalf of AARP. Thought maybe I won the AARP rewards  sweepstakes!

[Joe817]

5 minutes ago, pmatawan said:

betty weinkle sent me the gift card on behalf of AARP. Thought maybe I won the AARP rewards  sweepstakes!

Well I hope you did! Sure a strange way of doing business! 

[cruises42]

21 hours ago, Organized Chaos said:

 

That happened to me every time I logged in to the old Rewards for Good. I always had to log in twice. Except the 3-letter challenge would change. Oddly enough, it doesn't do that to me anymore with AARP Rewards.

 

I was able to get in tonight, hope that continues!

Edited October 5, 2019 by cruises42

[Joe817]

1 minute ago, cruises42 said:

 

I just read earlier today in the AARP forum that the rewards moderator recommends Chrome as your browser. That's what I use anyway, but YMMV. 

[blarko]

21 hours ago, Organized Chaos said:

 

I haven't bought anything so I don't have the email in question, but let me see if I can explain it differently.

 

If I understand you correctly, you're clicking on the link you were sent in the email. Do not click on it first. What angela is saying is that you have to "fix" the URL that they sent you. When she refers to "amp," she's talking about the parts of the URL that literally say "amp;" ... to include the semicolon at the end. Amp is short for ampersand. That's the name of this symbol ---> & <---. The problem is, the URL that they sent everyone, it includes that symbol AND the letters "amp" followed by a semicolon. It should only have the symbol.

 

So what you need to do is highlight the entire URL in your email, without click it, and copy it (right click, then click copy). Then paste the URL into your address bar (right click the address bar, then click paste). Just make sure the address bar doesn't already have a URL in it. You can also do this in a blank Notepad file or a Word file. Once you copy/past the whole URL, you have to delete all the times it says "amp;" and don't forget the semicolon. But be sure to leave the & symbol in there. Only delete each amp; and leave the rest. Once you've done that, you can hit Enter to see if the fixed URL takes you to your gift card page.

 

Hope that helps. Let us know how it goes.

 

Thank you for explaining it in terms I could understand. Although I tried removing the “amp;” (there were a total of 4 in the hyperlink), it still look me to a broken link. I tried it numerous times and it just wouldn’t work. Just as I decided I’d wasted enough of my day working on it, I received another email from AARP with a link that actually works. No explanation with the email and it looks identical to the original one, with the exception of the working link.  Weird.

 

So thank you again for your detailed explanation and although it didn’t work for me, perhaps there will be someone else that will benefit from it.

[Organized Chaos]

11 hours ago, Joe817 said:

I just read earlier today in the AARP forum that the rewards moderator recommends Chrome as your browser. That's what I use anyway, but YMMV. 

 

I use Firefox and haven't had any problems. It was running crazy slow the first couple days, but I think that was on their end. Probably overloaded with traffic, not to mention full of bugs. It's running better now, but still a subpar system compared to Rewards for Good, in my opinion. They should design a site that works equally well on all browsers instead of relying on a single one to make it run smoothly.

 

11 hours ago, blarko said:

 

Thank you for explaining it in terms I could understand. Although I tried removing the “amp;” (there were a total of 4 in the hyperlink), it still look me to a broken link. I tried it numerous times and it just wouldn’t work. Just as I decided I’d wasted enough of my day working on it, I received another email from AARP with a link that actually works. No explanation with the email and it looks identical to the original one, with the exception of the working link.  Weird.

 

So thank you again for your detailed explanation and although it didn’t work for me, perhaps there will be someone else that will benefit from it.

 

No problem, glad it all worked out in the end.

 

In case anyone missed my post from last night, the card vendor did send out new e-cards, so that's what y'all are getting. It's ridiculous that they didn't include an explanation about what was going on.

[biomedbob]

An update......My new Allstate cards, 4-$100.00 ones that I went through the motions last week to redeem, haven't shown up as a payment against a balance due for a cruise in March.

[Crickee81]

Grrr, no discount on new AARP rewards gift card site, fine print says discount at checkout, no discount was given, I was charged the full $500.  Took almost 25 min to get the site to work properly.  I won’t use this again, at least I’ll get my cash back on my credit card. 

[Organized Chaos]

6 minutes ago, Crickee81 said:

Grrr, no discount on new AARP rewards gift card site, fine print says discount at checkout, no discount was given, I was charged the full $500.  Took almost 25 min to get the site to work properly.  I won’t use this again, at least I’ll get my cash back on my credit card. 

 

I was able to logon without a problem. Where are you seeing the Carnival cards? For me, they're still not available. They haven't been since day one of the new program because of the PIN problem.

[Organized Chaos]

On 10/5/2019 at 2:20 PM, biomedbob said:

An update......My new Allstate cards, 4-$100.00 ones that I went through the motions last week to redeem, haven't shown up as a payment against a balance due for a cruise in March.

 

Try using Carnival's gift card website to check the balance on the cards: https://carnival.ourgiftcards.com/

 

If the funds are still there, then they didn't process for some reason. If they're empty, I'd call Carnival because that kind of sounds like it'd be a glitch with their system.

[threedjmay]

I joined AARP for the members only GC discount... no Carnival for me either. 😞

[rtfnl]

I'm trying to purchase discounted gift cards and it keeps trying to charge me the full payment. I dont see where I can purchase them at discounted rate on aarp site and gift expression site. I was trying to purchase them for at least a weekk.

[I_AM_GROOT]

46 minutes ago, rtfnl said:

I'm trying to purchase discounted gift cards and it keeps trying to charge me the full payment. I dont see where I can purchase them at discounted rate on aarp site and gift expression site. I was trying to purchase them for at least a weekk.

The Carnival Gift Cards have been removed for a few weeks now (since day two of relaunch) due to them not having a pin. We're still waiting on word when they will be back.

[rtfnl]

Thank you for the information. After two days of calling AARP and Gift Card Expression, I finally got in touch with someone who told me that they were taken out of catalog. 

[terals2003]

I'm not sure if it has been mentioned because I didn't read through the entire thread, but Retailmenot sells Carnival gift cards with 8% instant cash back ($8 back on $100, $20 back on $250, and $40 back on $500).  Not quite as good as AARP or Allstate, but require absolutely no work.

[Crickee81]

Be very, very careful!!! I purchased a $500 Carnival gift card with the new AARP gift card program, The Gift Card Shop, they charged my credit card $1,000.  I called the gift card company no live person so I left a message to cancel the entire order.  I don’t want to do business with a company that does this.  I then called AARP and my bank to dispute, AARP was very shocked and took all the info to escalate.  No one from the Gift Card Shop contacted me but they refunded the $1,000 today.