In case you hadn’t yet heard of El Gordo, it’s a massive Christmas lottery that occurs each year in Spain. The lottery is a favourite around the world and is easily one of the most popular lotteries toward the end of the year. Launched in 1996, elGordo.com is the premier site for the sale of not just El Gordo tickets but also other Spanish lotteries. In this elGordo.com review, we will look at how this site works and how you can make the best use of it.
How Does It Work?
Like with all other trusted lottery sites, it is a requirement that you register a player account to play. Funnily, however, you cannot do this by clicking on Join Now. Instead, you will first have to go and select which lottery you would like to take part in. Once you have done this, you will be able to select the numbers that you would like to play with. As always, if you don’t feel like doing this, you can opt to use the quick pick function and allow a random number generator to select your numbers for you.
After you have chosen your numbers, you can select if you would like to play in just one draw or a few draws at once. Then, add your tickets to your cart and continue to checkout. During checkout, you can opt to log into your user account if you are already registered or create a new account. Clicking to create a new account will mean you need to enter in all the usual information required such as your name, date of birth, and location.
It seems that your user account will only be officially opened and confirmed once you have completed payment for your first order. This whole process is certainly a new way of doing things, and we are not sure whether this is better than being able to register before making a purchase.
Once you have paid for your ticket, the website will send your order through to one of their agents, who will then purchase the physical ticket on our behalf. All tickets purchased are then stored at a local bank until the draw is over and they are checked to see if there are any winners.
Is elGordo.com Legit or a Scam?
The first thing that we looked at when deciding if we can trust this site is how long it has been around. elGordo.com is an incredibly old website and yet is still running strong almost 25 years later. This clearly means that they are doing something right and that players are not having any problems with them. Add to this that its online reputation is rather good, and we are confident that you can trust it and use the site without any worries.
The only thing that we will say more on this subject is that the terms and conditions could be better. They are very basic and leave room for interpretation in quite a few areas. In fact, they work only to cover all the legal bases of the site and do nothing more to ensure that the site and you as a player are protected. Digging deeper, there does seem to be a reason for this, which we will cover later on when we look at claiming prizes.
Lotteries Available
The site, which is based in and runs from Spain by TWL (The World Lottery) Spain, is genuinely home-based in that it only supports Spanish lotteries. This means that if you are looking for games such as the US Powerball or UK Lotto, you will want to look somewhere else. The available Spanish lotteries are:
El Gordo
National Lottery Special
National Lottery Thursday
National Lottery Saturday
Sunday Lottery
Spanish 6/49
Daily 6/49
Football Quiniela
EuroMillions
elNino
User Experience
The site is predominantly available in Spanish (not surprisingly), but has a good English version as well that manages to translate almost everything well—except for the terms and conditions, which are only available in Spanish. Aside from this, the site has a modern design and loads quickly and smoothly.
Navigation is one area that the developers behind elGordo.com could work on improving. While it is technically possible to navigate around the site using only the top menu bar, all pages excluding the home page have vertical menus that could be improved on and the different vertical menus placed around the page (particularly the Shop page) lead the site to look slightly cluttered and messy.
elGordo.com Extras
The site does not really appear to have any additional features. There is a results section that is pretty great and shows you the draw history for supported lotteries going all the way back to 2001. With this history is prize breakdowns that show the different prize tiers available. There is also a News & Info section that hosts a few articles relating to the supported lotteries and other general topics such as lottery scams to look out for.
Payment/Withdrawal Options
The payment methods are an area that causes us some concern, as there is no mention on the site as to what payment methods they support. In fact, the only way to discover this information is to register a player account and try and make a payment—which we did. When presented with the payment screen, the only options that we were given is to pay with a Visa or MasterCard. For a site that has been around as long as this, this is unacceptable and honestly quite disappointing. This is especially true if you want to play but don’t have access to one of these cards.
Withdrawals appear to be made directly to your bank account via electronic funds transfer. We don’t have solid confirmation on this, as it is not specified in the terms and conditions, but that is what the terminology that is there hints toward.
How to Claim Your Winnings
Claiming your winnings is not something covered correctly in the terms and conditions—at least in our opinion. What we can gather between the very little that is mentioned in the conditions and the answers given to questions on the site, prize claims take place automatically. The site will deposit your winnings directly into your player account after they have claimed them on your behalf—unless they are over the amount of €2,500 it seems.
It appears that prizes over this amount are deposited directly into your nominated bank account by the lottery operator. According to the site, the alternative to this is that they will give you the winning ticket and you will need to go and claim your prize on your own.
Customer Support
The website features an FAQ section that attempts to answer the questions a typical user may have. However, most of these answers tend to leave you with more questions than you began with and will lead you to become frustrated very quickly. There is also an online form, a support email address (info@elgordo.com), and a support contact number (+34 976 204 754). The contact number does not include any hours of operation, unfortunately.
Welcome Bonuses/Promotions
We could not find any mention of welcome bonuses for new players, and we saw nothing loaded on our account after registering. There is also no talk of any other type of promotions anywhere on the site.
Rules and Regulations
According to the site, they have players in over 140 countries around the world and, as such, they don’t mention any country that you are not allowed registering from. The only real condition that is mentioned is that you must be 18 years of age or older to make use of their services.
elGordo.com Review Conclusion
elGordo.com is an excellent site to get hold of tickets for Spanish lotteries. There is no denying that, and we think that, for the local market in Spain, this should be the go-to place to buy tickets online. However, with the lack of clarity on how prizes are claimed and the hint that you may have to take your ticket in and claim your prize yourself, this site may not be the best recommendation for international players. This is even more true when the main lottery (El Gordo) is offered on several other online lottery websites that have much clearer terms and conditions.
Overall then, this site is worth taking a look at, but only if you are a Spanish resident. For anyone else, suggest treading carefully—not because you will be scammed and lose money—but merely because you may be in for some inconvenience if you end up winning a prize.
I do like elGordo for playing some Spanish game but so limit is the site beside that