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Tea Time Bingo Verdict
Tea Time Bingo is a nicely designed, well-stocked online bingo site that offers some impressive prizes. However, if you’re a veteran bingo player, you’ll find it hard to overlook the fact that Tea Time’s essentially a replica of all the other sites on the Cozy/BBN network.
Percentage score
Design & Usability
The Tea Time Bingo homepage features a smiling cartoon mum who’s sitting playing bingo in her kitchen while her teapot ejects a stream of gold coins onto the table in front of her.
Rather bizarrely, she reminds us of adult Ellie in Pixar’s hit movie Up, even though Tea Time predates the film’s UK release by one month. It also appears that the design team took inspiration from printer ink cartridges, as the colours it’s chosen to use are dead ringers for magenta, yellow, and cyan. The end result is a cheerful and inviting site that’s easy to find your way around.
And just as you are able to view all the welcome offers on a big banner at the top of the page, you can also preview the games schedule beneath it.
Software & Gameplay
Cozy Games software is known for being fairly quick and reliable, although it’s nowhere near as nice to look at as Dragonfish sites. Although the lobby lets you browse the available games by Bingo, Tourney, Slots, Casino, Scratch, and Free Bets, you can’t filter on the bingo variants or jackpot games, which is a bit annoying.
The jackpot rooms are networked but the remainder are only open to Tea Time members, and we’ve always found friendly chat hosts manning them during opening hours.
Safety & Security
If you’re looking for a trustworthy operator, Tea Time Bingo possesses all of the required licenses and certificates. It’s regulated and licensed by the Great Britain Gambling Commission, and uses SSL encryption to process payments. It also uses an independently tested Random Number Generator to create fair and random results for each of its games.
Payments & Withdrawals
There’s a moderate amount of payment options to choose from, including Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, Solo, Switch, Delta, Paysafecard, Skrill, and Neteller. It would, however, be nice to see Boku (Pay by Mobile), Entropay, and Paypal added to the list.
Making deposits and withdrawals is easy enough, and the Cashier allows you to enter bonus codes at the checkout. Be warned that you can only request a withdrawal of £30 or more, and you cannot withdraw more than £300 per week without prior agreement from the customer support team. The operator aims to process withdrawal requests within three working days.
Customer Support
You can contact the support team by raising a ticket, launching the live chat service, or sending an email.
Unfortunately, telephone is not an option, and there’s a noticeable design flaw in that the FAQ page is separate from the Contact Us page.
Surely, if players need help, it would be good to give them visibility of the FAQ prior to the contact methods. You also have to scroll all the way down to the footer to find the links, and we feel it would be more appropriate if they were added to the main menu.
Bonuses & Promotions
While there is a diverse range of promotions, they’re all the standard BBN offers that you can find at other sites like Little Miss Bingo.
There’s some good news though as you can claim a free £15 bonus when you sign up and verify your email address, although you won’t be able to withdraw the bonus. Afterwards, you can claim a 400% welcome bonus when you deposit £10 or more, as well as reload rewards of up to 400% bonus funds or up to 150% cash on all future deposits.
It would be nice if Tea Time provided a link to the welcome offers T&Cs, as you currently have to go hunting for them via a link at the bottom of the site. The welcome bonus requires you to meet wagering requirements of 4x bingo or 10x slots prior to making a withdrawal request, but in a separate section of the terms and conditions, it’s stated that other types of bonuses (namely every type of bonus except deposit bonuses such as chat bonuses, bingo bonuses and casino cash, free cards, free spins, and daily login bonuses) are subject to 8x bingo and 20x slots wagering requirements.
Device Compatibility
As is the case with the majority of Cozy Games bingo sites, Tea Time lets you play its games instantly in your mobile web browser. We’ve yet to find a device that isn’t compatible, and the playing experience is on a par with the desktop site, with the exception of the chat facility which isn’t available for mobiles.
Variety & Originality
There are fourteen different rooms to choose from which run 90-ball, 80-ball, 75-ball, and 30-ball games every few minutes. The most popular appear to be the 90-ball rooms – Big Ben in particular – and tickets will set you back by 2p to 50p each. The prize pots are usually linked to ticket sales, so it’s often better to play in the busiest rooms if you want a shot at the biggest prizes.
There’s not much in the way of free games bar the daily, weekly, and monthly jackpot games which you can earn free cards for by making regular deposits, and even though there are more variants and rooms to choose from than Tea Time’s competitors, they’re the same as all the other BBN brands.
The casino games and scratch cards selection is impressive, although all of them are designed by Cozy Games. We do appreciate the fact that you can play them with cash or BBs, and that there’s a dedicated “Free Bets” section in the lobby.
Loyalty & Rewards
You can earn loyalty points by playing bingo and slots with real cash. Every £2 spent on bingo and every £10 spent on slots gets you one point. Earning just one point will place you into the first tier (Challenger), and each time you hit your points target, you’ll move up a level. There are four tiers in total, but the weird thing is, there’s no mention of any benefits bar being able to turn your loyalty points into bonus cash…
While they’re not included in the VIP scheme, there are other promotions which let you earn deposit bonuses and £10 Amazon vouchers by referring friends to the site.