Another example of the problems of not having a chip card in Europe:

I'm in Hungary, rented a car a few days ago, and today was going to park at a small rmountain town's parking lot. It's a typical European get-your-ticket-form-the-machine-and-put-it-on-your-dash kind of pay parking, but only takes two kinds of payment: coins (no bills!) or chip cards. Couldn't use my swipe card, didn't have enough coins, and went around to half a dozen manned kiosks/etc near the parking lot and not a single one would change my 1000 forint bill (the 500 forint bill is the smallest one, and coins go up to 200, so this was equivalent to no one in the US being willing to change a $5 bill).

I thus had to leave the official parking lot (not wanting to risk who knows what kind of fine for not paying), and found a parking space at a nearby non-pay-machine lot where the gate was not working and thus always up.

So my credit card company lost out on me charging for the parking, and the parking lot lost out on me parking there and paying, all because of this incompatiblity of a swipe card with a chip-card-only parking payment machine.

So now, to make up for this, I not only have to get cash, but change that cash into who knows how many coins??? (Yikes, I don't know if I'm going to park once at such a parking lot or 25 times on my trip, how to manage all those coins then? Yuck!)