My experience with Groupon is getting really weird. On one side I keep buying interesting deals from them (one just now) and on the other I recently ranted about a grey area of their business model and now I feel like I bought a silly deal just yesterday. But I wonder who’s to blame in this last case? Let me explain what happened.

Groupon had a deal on Saturday for the Heathrow Express: £6.50 instead of £16.50 - very good deal, as I’m going to Heathrow in a few days I bought 2 of them, for my girlfriend and myself. The voucher is valid for 2 months.

Then today I see this tweet: “£5 one way tickets on Heathrow Express”. So I went to their website and all was confirmed by a big shiny banner…

WTF? Yesterday when I activated my Groupon voucher (you had to activate it by the end of today, not sure why) there wasn’t anything like this! So back to the initial question… who’s to ‘blame’ for this? As a customer this feels really lame…
I’m not ruling out completely the fact that I may have not seen this offer before, but a) I’m 99% sure it wasn’t there until today and b) what would be the sense of running a Groupon deal if you already have a better offer on your site?

The only thing that differentiate the 2 offers is that the Groupon’s one is valid for 2 months while the one from Heathrow Express site is valid only between today (a clear hint that this offer wasn’t available before) and Jan. 2nd. Well, thank you…