On Apr 2, 2010, at 6:46 PM, Hadriel Kaplan wrote:
Not to belabor this thread, but...
I was in Schiphol the week before IETF Anaheim and bought a train ticket.
*None* of the my cards worked (Amex, Visa, Mastercard, and a debit, and yes I
tried all of them). In fact, not only did they not work at the machines, but
they were not accepted at the human-based ticket counter either, despite my
having a Passport and one of the cards even has my picture on it. They had a
sign even warning that it wouldn't work without a "PIN". It was cash only,
but there is an ATM near by. I travel a lot and was quite surprised.
This was my experience as well (I travel a lot, to many countries in Europe and
Asia, and have never had a problem until I travelled to the Netherlands last
year) --- except my ATM card didn't work, either. When I talked to my bank,
they told me it was because of fraud problems in that country specifically; I
would have needed to warn them at least a few days in advance i was planning on
visiting the Netherlands for them to put my card on a special authorization
list.
Maybe all of my credit card providers (Amex, Chase, Citigroup, etc.) are losers
(actually, the problem with Amex was that the train station didn't accept it,
not that my Amex card didn't work. Ultimately Amex was the only card that
worked for me, and I ended up getting a cash advance using my Amex card), but
if I were you, I'd bring Euros, and make sure you inform your bank and credit
card issuers in advance. I've never needed to do this before when traveling
to other countries, and I've never had trouble getting local currency out of an
ATM machine, so I had gotten complacent....
-- Ted
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