Battling the Credit Card Acceptance Problem when you Travel to another Country

Credit card acceptance is something you take for granted. You go to a store that displays the logo of your credit card and there is nothing more that you think about in the whole thing. Considering that Visa, MasterCard and American Express are American products, wouldn't you expect that they would bring their latest technology out to market here in America? Well, try using one of your credit cards anywhere in Europe and you're likely to run into a fundamental problem - credit cards over there don't work with a magnetic strip. Their credit card readers (or the people manning the machines) aren't equipped to deal with the ancient magnetic strips that American credit cards have. They expect cards to come with an embedded smart chip. You'll have this happen to you no matter what country in Europe you travel to.

Credit cards with an embedded smart chip are called EMV cards (for Europay-MasterCard-Visa). And American banks, realizing that their outdated credit card products are keeping people from doing their shopping when they travel overseas, are beginning to deal with the whole credit card acceptance issue by issuing their own EMV cards that'll be accepted worldwide. While in Europe every kid fresh out of college gets one of these EMV cards, in America, the banks are trying them out only with special superrich customers first. If you don't happen to be especially rich and you still need to travel to Europe, Travelex, the currency exchange business, will sell you an EMV debit card that you preload with money. You will also find them with some credit unions.

Not to be too hard on the American banks for holding off so long on innovation. The reason Europe was an early adopter of this technology was that they believed that credit cards that held their information locked up in a chip protected by a secret PIN number would be far safer than a credit card that was open to the world with information in a magnetic strip. They also believe that credit cards like this would be harder to counterfeit. There's no reason why these beliefs should be mistaken. Except that they are.

American banks have found that EMV credit cards are actually stolen from, a lot more than magnetic strip cards, for some reason. The expense it would be to throw away every credit card reading machine in America and replace it with a new one is understandably a concern too. Until the industry sorts itself out, problems while you travel to Europe, Canada or Asia, are only to be expected. While their card readers certainly are capable of accepting magnetic strip credit cards from the other side of the Atlantic, the clerks who man those desks and operate those machines have never actually seen a magnetic strip credit card and have no idea what to do with them.

Since most clerks will refuse to put in the extra effort it might take to figure out how to use your credit card, carrying a prepaid EMV debit card would have to be the next best thing. It would guarantee credit card acceptance for you.