Originally Posted by
mary_228
Thanks soitoges for the link. I have emailed it to her. Just one of the many frustrations of foreign travel that I thought in this day and age we'd be done with. I just called AMEX and they only offer the chip on one of their many cards (the clear blue one), not the Costco one I have. And our Mastercard does not offer it either, but at least they knew what I was talking about!
I don't think the Amex card works in the same way as the European chip/pin cards--I'm not sure the PIN is encoded on the chip.
I agree it's frustrating (right now there aren't any US-based Visa or MC cards being issued with chip/pin). It has to do with different card processing systems in the US and Europe. With face-to-face transactions, it's inconvenient, but not difficult. With some standalone machine transactions, it is impossible to use a non-chip/pin card, though vendors are supposed to program them to recognize non-chip/pin cards. Hopefully that situation will improve.