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It's the second week of December. A regular's husband calls your salon to buy her a gift card, because he's heard your name for months and still has no idea what a balayage is. Your front desk is three deep at checkout, so the call rings out. He doesn't leave a message. He books a spa package across town instead, and you never find out the sale existed.
Gift cards get treated like an afterthought at a lot of salons, a dusty rack by the register that comes out in December. That's a mistake. Gift cards are the single most requested holiday gift in the country, topping the National Retail Federation's wish list at 50%, ahead of clothing, and beauty is one of the categories where they sell hardest.
The catch is that a surprising share of those sales still begin with a ringing phone. When nobody picks up, the money walks. Here's how much a gift card is actually worth to a salon, why so many of the sales hinge on a call, and how to stop handing them to the salon down the street.
Part of what makes gift cards attractive is that the customer is easy to please. Shoppers say they like gift cards because the recipient gets to choose, and because they're quick to buy compared with hunting down the perfect present. Close to half of shoppers plan to buy at least one each holiday season, and holiday gift card spending runs to around $29 billion a year in the US alone.
Beauty punches above its weight here. Salons roughly doubled their gift card sales in 2024, and med spas grew theirs by more than 20%, according to industry data from Zenoti. Turning on online sales, so a buyer can send an e-gift in a couple of minutes, added a few thousand dollars a month on average for the spas that did it. Advisors who work with salons suggest gift cards should account for 10 to 15 percent of total sales at a healthy business.
They also cost you almost nothing to sell. You're collecting cash today for a service you'll deliver later, which is about as friendly to your bank balance as revenue gets. Both salon software firms and operators make the same point: a gift card is really a prepaid appointment with a new client attached, and that's the part most owners underrate.
A $100 gift card almost never turns into exactly $100 of business. First Data's prepaid study found that people spend an average of $59 beyond the value of the card, and about three-quarters of recipients overspend it at least a little. The reason is plain psychology. Money sitting on a gift card feels separate from your own wallet, so people upgrade to the deluxe service, add a retail product at checkout, and tip on the full amount. The same research found that 44% of people visited a business they otherwise wouldn't have because someone handed them a card.
Then there's the card that never gets spent. Somewhere between a tenth and a fifth of gift card value goes unredeemed, and Americans are sitting on billions in forgotten balances at any moment, roughly $3 billion a year by one estimate. An unredeemed card is awkward for the giver, but on your books it's revenue you already banked and never had to staff. The economics of that breakage are a big reason large chains push gift cards so hard.
The most valuable piece is the person holding the card. They may have never set foot in your salon. The card gets them in the chair once, and if that visit goes well, a single appointment can turn into a client who rebooks for years. You paid nothing to acquire them, and someone else covered the first ticket.
Plenty of gift cards get bought online now, and that's a good thing. But a large slice of buyers still reach for the phone, and they tend to be the buyers you least want to lose. Older shoppers buy more gift cards than any other age group and spend more per card, and they're the most likely to call and ask a human whether you sell them, whether they can pay over the phone, and whether it can be emailed today. NRF holiday data has consistently shown shoppers 65 and over leading gift card purchases.
Gift card calls also carry a deadline. Someone dialing on December 23rd or the morning of a birthday needs an answer now, not a callback tomorrow. Salon coaches describe the same pattern every year, a last-minute gift card rush in the final days before a holiday. If that call hits voicemail, the buyer doesn't wait. Analyses of business phone traffic keep landing on the same uncomfortable finding: most callers who reach voicemail hang up without leaving a message, and a chunk of them just dial the next salon on the list.
That's the quiet leak. The buyer had cash in hand and every intention of spending it with you, and the only thing between you and the sale was a phone nobody could reach.
Here's the trap. Gift card demand spikes at exactly the moments your front desk has the least time to pick up an extra call. The winter holidays are the obvious one, with record seasonal spending and 43% of shoppers buying at least one gift card. The peaks keep coming all year.
On those days your team is already behind on service calls, checkout, and walk-ins. A gift card question is the easiest call to let ring, and it's also one of the most profitable to answer. That's a bad trade to make by accident.
The fix isn't complicated. It comes down to making the sale easy to finish and making sure nobody who wants to buy ever hits a dead end.
Sell them online as well as at the desk, with an e-gift option a buyer can send in a couple of minutes. Spas that switched on online gift card sales watched them become one of their fastest-growing revenue channels. Put the link in your Instagram bio, your Google Business Profile, and your booking page, so the buyer who's ready at 11pm can finish without calling anyone.
Online sales sit beside the phone, they don't replace it. You still need someone to pick up when a buyer calls to ask how it works, and during the holiday crush that's the hardest promise to keep with a human team. This is where an AI phone receptionist earns its place. It answers on the first ring, day or night, tells the caller you sell gift cards, points them to the online purchase or takes down their details, and books the recipient's appointment, all without sending anyone to voicemail. Owners' guides keep repeating the same thing: the gift card sale you can actually collect is the one where someone answers the question fast.
A sold card is only half the value. The other half is the appointment it becomes. Capture the recipient's booking while they're on the line, or the moment they call to redeem, and treat that first visit as the start of a relationship rather than a one-off. That's how a $120 card written for a stranger becomes a client who's still coming in two years later, which is the whole reason gift cards matter to a salon in the first place.
Gift cards are close to free money for a salon. Paid upfront, spent above their value, sometimes never redeemed, and attached to a brand-new client. About the only reliable way to lose that money is to let the phone ring out while someone is trying to hand it to you. Make the card easy to buy, make sure every call gets answered, and the easiest sale in your salon stops slipping away.
