Originally Posted by
geosch
So I got the voucher today, took them five days to issue it (pretty good under current circumstances; they wrote it would take "up to 15 business days"). The voucher is valid for five years from the day of issue (the same is true for their purchasable gift vouchers), so way better than what most airlines are currently trying to satisfy their customers with.
It is a legal requirement now in Ireland that all vouchers are valid for at least 5 years:
The Consumer Protection (Gift Vouchers) Act will impose a minimum expiry date of five years for vouchers and ban contract terms which require them to be spent in a single transaction.
The new law will also ban contract terms that limit the number of vouchers that can be used in a transaction and prohibit the cancellation of gift vouchers or the imposition of charges by airlines if the name of a gift voucher recipient differs from the name on a passport.
In passing the laws Ireland has become the first European country to enact legislation protecting consumers in this area.
This is not Aer Lingus magnanimity; but a legal requirement they must observe when issuing vouchers.
While in some ways this is customer-friendly, in other ways it's not; with such a long period to use the voucher, it actively encourages many such recipients to file it away and forget all about it
and therefore never to spend the voucher. Additionally, waiting for as long as 5 years to spend a voucher means that the spending power of that voucher will have markedly dropped. Prices tend to go only one way - up.