I've been recently booking some travel abroad and had a really difficult time making payments. Pretty much every charge that originated from a different country got rejected the first time around. Sometimes you need 2 factor authorization (2FA), sometimes you get a fraud alert and they threaten t...
I'm a US resident. Cards issued from typical household names: Bank of America, Chase, Citi, Capital One. Transactions rejected from Germany, India, South Africa.
What card payment controls have you set? My UK-issued VISA card lets me set individual limits for different transaction types, eg chip&PIN, contactless, online, phone, gambling etc, from the banking app and/or online.
@Traveller: None of my US cards allows me to set that, I think. It also doesn't seem to matter, even very small charges are rejected regularly.
@NeanDerThal: one of my cards is a Master Card. I haven't noticed a difference between Visa and Master Card but, granted, I have not systematically tracked that. Do you have any data that indicates Master Card is less prone to that ?
@Hilmar I have a master card that i rarely use, but when I face the same problems as you do, I find that card to be working right away. However, even my visa cards do not mess up with me as much as yours. Mine only pick a few countries (China, Malaysia, etc.) and act weirdly.
@Hilmar I have one each of VISA, MasterCard and AmEx, from the same bank, and the only one that never bothered me (after doing the proper "overseas settings") was indeed MasterCard. Only a random data point, but...
100% with you on this. Traveling with family in 2018, we each had 3 different cards, each on different accounts (4 of us - a total of 12 different cards/accounts!) and frequently dealt with rejected transactions despite having told each and every issuer that we were traveling and which countries we'd be making transactions in. Just another reminder of exactly how artificial Artificial "Intelligence" really is.
Fantastic question! Me too, I have been suffering more and more from this as credit card companies have been forcefully trying to validate transactions this way even if one did not sign up for 2FA! There is no way I would be roaming my number due to cost and rarely have a local SIM, which would not be cleared either.
@Hilmar - Indeed, I also observed that it is not evenly distributed between cards. The most reliable so far has been HSBC MasterCard which is the only one of my 4 cards that worked in Japan, Taiwan and Indonesia. Even in Iceland, when some of my other cards worked, HSBC was the only one that was accepted at automated gaz stations. Sadly HSBC Canada just folded and will be needing to find another reliable option for Canadians.
Call the bank when at home and ask them why the transactions were rejected, and how you could have had it approved.? "Why was this rejected?" If they say their system detected potential fraud, "well, it wasn't potential fraud so how do I get it to approve things?"
"Ironically the two most zealous cards are specifically designed as travel cards." That's why I had one travel card for exactly one holiday. They wouldn't even respond to the problem on the phone.
@MikeP The people you reach will be customer service drones. They have no idea why your card was rejected or how to fix this. If you're very lucky, they will know that and admit it. Otherwise, they will tell some lies to get you off the phone, or try some stuff that doesn't work; and you won't find out until the next time you travel.
Have you tried using the card through a wallet provider like Apple Pay or Google Pay? Those at least handle all the 2FA-ish stuff. All my cards are European (with 2FA mandatory by law since around 2020), though, and I don’t recall ever seeing anything like a fraud claim on any of them, so I don’t know whether wallets actually make any difference with regard to fraud claims.
@Hilmar - As of last June, both my Chase and Citi administered Visa cards were happy to have me call them and I used them successfully on a trip to France. Same with my local credit union Visa and ATM cards.
@JonCuster At least for Amex, their phone system will actually tell you that they do not need a travel notification without ever connecting you to anyone if you tell it that you're calling to provide a travel notification. I haven't needed to do travel notifications on my Amex or Chase cards in several years, but I haven't had problems with them abroad, either.
@reirab - ah, memories of using various busy Amex offices around Europe. (Made even better by being a college student with a gold Amex card - when that meant something in the early 80's - and being hassled for being in the "wrong" line until I pulled it out.) Historically Amex fully expected you to be traveling far and wide and didn't want anything getting in your way of using their card overseas.
Discussion on question by Hilmar: How…
Discussion on question by Hilmar: How…