zulily's July Cuties Competition

I'm sure lots of you are now regulars in the super competitions that zulily run on Instagram - and the July competition is now open.

 

You'll find full details, as usual, over on their Tumblr, but here's a summary - in zulily's own words -  of what you need to do.

 

The July theme for our Instagram competition is “Cuties’ Best Friends”. Whether your cutie’s BFF is a sibling, a friend, a teddy, a cat, or even a cardboard box (it happens), we’d like to see your Instagram snaps.

Our favourite photo wins a £100 zulily voucher, along with Cat in the Hat and Grinch cuddly toys and two Juicy Couture charms.

How to enter:

1. Upload an Instagram snap of your little cutie with their best friend 
2. Make sure your profile is public, so that we can see your photo
3. You need to follow zulilyUK on Instagram (@zulilyUK) and tag your picture with three things:

• #zulilyUKJulyCutiesCompetition
• @zulilyUK
• and either: #zulilynewbie (if you’re new to zulily) or #zulilian (if you’ve already joined zulily)

The competition closes on Wednesday 31^st of July. We’ll be shortlisting on Thursday 1^st of August and if you win we’ll contact you via Instagram comments. The winner will be announced on our blog no later than Monday 5^th of August. The Ts&Cs are here. If you haven’t already joined zulily, do come on over!

Because we love to share the cuteness around, during this competition we may post some of the entries:

• On the zulily Facebook page
• On the zulily tumblr
• On the zulily Pinterest board for zulily Cuties

 

Win tickets to a beer festival!

YouAndYourRights have a five sets of tickets to give away for St, George's Hall Beer Festival in Liverpool. To enter simply go to http://www.youandyourrights.com/,  and click on the competition section. One entry per person. Over 18's only. Closing 24th July.

Two new competitions for you

YouAndYourRights have a copy of Celebrities on Ice DVD to give away. To enter simply go to http://www.youandyourrights.com/, and click on the competition section. One entry per person. Closing 19 July.


Kavey Eats has a £50 Just Eat voucher to be won - the winner can spend the prize at their choice of thousands of takeaways that let you order through the Just Eat site. To enter, head over to Kavey Eats and enter up to three times, once by commenting, once by liking the Facebook page and once by sending out a tweet. This closes on July 26th.

Our prize Danube trip

As you probably know by now, we were sent home early from our holiday on the Danube. The flooding situation meant that the cruise wasn't viable, with many parts of the river completely closed to shipping due to damaged locks and impassable bridges, and  after a few days spent on two different moored boats, making excursions by coach from them, it was decided to send everyone home.

As a prize winner, I technically wasn't entitled to a refund from the tour company or the insurance company, as such refunds are generally calculated based on the amount actually paid, but they discussed the situation with the promoter and came up with an offer of another cruise this year - impossible because Mark has no leave left - or a refund of part of the cost of the trip. This seemed reasonable - after all, we'd still had flights both ways, a week of full board accommodation and several trips, some of which were excellent.

We spent the first two nights in Vienna, one of my favourite cities in the world. On the first day there was a coach trip to Melk Abbey. The floods had affected the roads too, so we had to use the motorway to get there, but on the way back the road alongside the river had reopened and we could clearly see the flood damage and defences. In one place the silt was being removed from a child's playground and it had come almost to the top of the swings!

I'm not going to give you full details of our trip, because Mark has written about it so thoroughly - you can see his posts here, here,  here and here.  But I thought you'd want to know what can happen from a comper's point of view when a holiday is curtailed or cancelled.

And of course despite all Mark's lovely photos, I had to share a few here too!



The most important thing for a comper - a postbox!

 Enjoying the beautiful Budapest night skyline 

It's a lonely life on the Puzta. A man and his donkey can grow very fond of each other. 

Happy pickles for Happy Meals? 

This month's Right Venues competition

This  month, Right Venues is giving away an overnight stay for two on a dinner, bed and breakfast basis in the newly refurbished Renaissance Hotel in Manchester City Centre. The prize even includes parking - and having had to park in the middle of Manchester a couple of times myself, I know what a massive benefit that is!

To enter, just head over to their competition page and answer a simple question. And don't forget, you can leave the Job Title and Company boxes empty - they are happy to welcome entries from Grape Vine magazine and blog readers, even if  you aren't currently in the market for finding a venue.  After all, you never know when you WILL be!

URGENT - another Facebook scam competition!

At the weekend, word got around about a scam competition offering huge prizes on an Argos Facebook page. The page was NOT Argos's own page, and when the real Argos heard about it they posted a warning to users. The fake page closed, but was that the end of the matter?

No, now a fake Tesco page has popped up. Once again, they are offering some very tempting prizes - 15  55" TVs - as a "little thank you" for liking and sharing the competition.

A little thank you? It sounds like a blooming BIG thank you to me - or it would do, if there were any TVs on offer at all!

But there aren't. It is a fake page and what is known as a like-farming scam. The scammer are offering highly attractive prizes, in the hope of collecting as many likes as possible. They will then sell the page, complete with likes, on the black market to the kind of business that can't legitimately tout for likes all of their own. So if you like a page that is running a competition like this, you may suddenly find your pages feed full of posts about something unpleasant, shocking or even illegal, something you (hopefully) have absolutely no interest in at all.

How can you tell a page is fake? First of all, look at the name. The real name Tesco has already been taken, but the scammers have got round this by adding a full stop at the end - very easy to overlook, especially in the excitement of thinking you have won a TV.

Next, look at the number of likes. The real Tesco would have far more than 886 likes! In fact they have well over a million.

Then look at the page in general. This page really doesn't look right, does it? There are no posts about anything but the competition, they only joined Facebook a few hours ago yet mention "last month's winners", there are no customer complaints or interactions - it's not just a fake, it's a very bad fake!

Never let the lure of a possible big prize make your common sense fly out of the window, or you could find yourself being sucked into a scam that could turn out to be very nasty!

Win a 6 months subscription to Grape Vine

Should there be an apostrophe at the end of months? a 6 months subscription or a 6 months' subscription? At this time of month, I always  find myself wondering!

Anyway, apostrophe or not, our monthly competition is now open for July and you'll find it on the competition page - why not bookmark the page and come back every month to enter? In June there were only 175 entries - entries to all comps, big and small, tend to drop off during the summer months when people are busy with holidays, families and gardens, so make the most of your chances!