Originally Posted by
percysmith
Identifying yourself as a foreigner is the last thing you ever want to do if you are trying to bargain for anything. Even pulling out a credit card is usually not a good idea.
Originally Posted by
kebosabi
And if that should happen, there's always the class action lawsuit path as we did with foreign transaction fees.
Why should we let corporations make choices for us? Just because VISA/MC has billions in dollars doesn't mean we should let them rail over us. We managed to reverse some of their actions by making FTFs more clear through class action lawsuits.
We won FTFs.
We won the EMV conversion.
We can get banks to give us a selective DCC option section that we can preset ourselves online.
The FTF lawsuit was about disclosure, not about providing options. Credit card companies aren't required to provide you with the option of having an FTF or not having an FTF, they are simply required to inform you of the cost. Similarly, if there were any DCC lawsuit, it would likely only be possible if DCC were not disclosed properly. As long as the receipt gives the amount charged, I don't see any basis for a lawsuit. Of course, IANAL.
Originally Posted by
kebosabi
How would merchants know? No matter what merchants do, whatever selection they did on the POS side, the decline DCC is done automatically because the decline DCC option is already preset at the issuer side. And all transactions that are done online, especially in an EMV environment, goes to the issuer's server.
1. I hand card
2. Merchant processes it, tries to tack on DCC without providing the customer an option
3. Issuer server sees that cardholder preset decline DCC option
4. Goes through processing automatically without DCC
5. Merchant prints receipt thinking that they're getting more, probably not going to look at the receipt in detail anyway
6. I sign knowing that every transaction I make is without DCC as what I preset on the server end triumphs all POS entry choices
7. By the time I'm in my home country
8. Merchant sad to know that he/she get no DCC because cardholder already had it preset on issuer's servers
It doesn't work that way. When the merchant "asks" for a certain amount of a certain currency, the issuer can neither lower the amount nor change the currency. All it can do is decline the transaction.
If I go to the bank and ask for a loan of 200 euros, they either say yes or no. They don't put USD 175 in an envelope and say "here you are".
If what the merchant wants does not match what the issuer is willing to pay (in both amount and currency) the transaction will not go through.