I often give relatives gift subscriptions to magazines like Dog Fancy, Reptile, National Geographic, Smithsonian, etc., and one of my pet peeves is that the magazines send the renewal notices not to me, but to the recipient. Our niece will be twelve next month. Last year we gave her Harry Potter DVDs and a gift subscription to a pet magazine, since she loves animals and has two parakeets (budgies). I was just wondering about the best way of renewing it, and got a very pleasant surprise yesterday. Somebody called, and asked whether we wanted to renew the gift subscription, and said if so, they would send us a printed gift card, and call back every year to ask about the renewal. Why can't other companies do that? I've had a lot of trouble renewing National Geographic and Dog Fancy gift subscriptions, because the subscriptions are in somebody else's name, no records were kept of who paid for the subscription, and I was never informed of the customer account numbers. National Geographic lost two subscriptions for that reason.
