I was just in Amsterdam a month ago and I needed to buy tickets at the Amsterdam Central station. As expected, the machine wouldn't take my Capital One card. We then headed over to the counter. I gave my card and the attendant wouldn't take it either. So, we ended up paying cash, which fortunately we had enough at the time. While the Capital One card was accepted in most places, it was a bit of an inconvenience to not be able to use it for automated machines. I hope the banks in the U.S will soon catch up on this by issuing chip and pin cards.

I had a Travelex C&P Cash Passport, and I wasn't able to get it to work in these machines either. I don't know why. It worked in other places.

I wonder if this is, in general, policy of NS (the corporate name of the Dutch National Railways) or just something done in Amsterdam on the part of the manager of the individual ticketing office....it is not the visa/mc policy from what I've been able to read. Somebody should contact NS and/or mc or visa international to find out what gives.

In general, the machines accept only Euro coins (not bills/notes), Dutch bank cards and Maestro (not Mastercard!) cards. Some machines in tourist-heavy stations as Amsterdaam central and Schiphol also accept Visa and MasterCard with a surcharge.

I have several European non-Dutch chip-and-pin cards, but for Dutch tickets, I make sure I have coins!

How do you your card was denied for not having an EMV chip? When you inserted your card, did it only go part way in?

The card wasn't denied. When I inserted the card, the machine processed it but came out with a message that the card couldn't be used, or something along the line. I remember seeing a sign with a picture that said only chip and pin cards were accepted.

Did you have to enter your PIN into the machine? If so, do you remember whether you were charged interest immediately on this purchase? A post elsewhere indicated that if a credit card was and a PIN entered, it was charged as a cash advance, thereby accruing interest charges immediately.

Credit cards issued in the USA have a PIN only for the purpose of withdrawing cash from an ATM, not to authorize a purchase. If you were to use a credit card to draw cash from an ATM it would indeed be a cash advance.

Most JCB cards are EMV compliant (ie chip/pin) and all their corporate cards seem to be. Some of their cobrands are nto. When applying you can confirm that you will receive the chip/pin card.

Just with any other country, it's about money. NS is not going to install mag-stripe readers when 99% of their population and other tourists from other nations uses a Chip & PIN and only the absurd 1% American tourist has cards without them. VISA and MC aren't going to do jack squat because NS makes them lots of money from transaction fees so they aren't going to punish NS by revoking their right to use VISA and MC.

At best, it's a canned response of "thank you for notfiying us, we will closely monitor the situation and make proactive decisions as needed," which just a euphemism for "sucks to be you, we ain't gonna do nothing because NS makes hundreds and thousands for us in transaction fees."

So VISA and MC pushes the blame to US banks for not going to EMV, but the US banks say "I don't wanna, I'd rather keep issuing the 8 bit fifty year old technology mag-stripes because it only costs 10 cents to make and besides if we go EMV, those cards are gonna cost more and we have spend billions in upgrades and I won't be able to buy my tenth yacht and my third summer home in the Swiss Alps."

Nearly all US credit cards will charge as cash advances any transaction at an ATM. Some regard any transaction for which a PIN is used as near-cash so treat those a a cash advance.

Debit card, which almost always use the PIN are not charged in that way.

As mia has already posted please remember US cards have a PIN on credit cards for use at ATM's but no chip. US debit cards have the pin for the same reason, still no chip.

MC and V both want the US, Russia and other non-EMV compliant countries to get there as quickly as possible. They both are public companies with a keen sense of the possible so they'll not try to force countries issuers and acquirers to comply.

As fro the last sentence surely you exaggerate. I know of no US card executive with more than one yacht, or more than one Swiss ski chalet either. Many have their other ski chalet in the Rockies, and have an island in a warm tropical place. You probably forgot that it is the personal jet that usually negates the need for other Swiss summer homes. :)

Ah, so Russia is another one? Does that mean the futher east you go in Europe, the less of a problem having a mag-stripe-only card is? :)

(I'm going to Hungary next month. Anyone have stripe-vs-chip&pin experiences there, or elsewhere in Eastern Europe? Thanks.)

Not quite. Most NS stations don't accept Visa or MasterCard at all.

Chip/pin is not a problem in western europe either. Americans who are addicted to plastic, and expect the same plastic card to work everywhere, will rant loudly about the one obscure corner case where their magstripe didn't work for some reason, and they were forced to use cash (generally for something cheaper than €50). This creates a distortion of the situation. Of those rare cases of rejection, it's actually the issuing region of the card that's being rejected, or sometimes the network, but not normally the technology (e.g. if you could bring a US-issued EMV card to madrid, that will also be rejected by the metro).

Trying to come up with an EMV card before you go is actually a big time waster. In the worst case, if you're unusually unlucky, you might have to stand in line to pay cash to a human on one occasion where a kiosk takes only european bank cards (maestro), and that will take less time (and cost less) than trying to get a travelex emv card.

It is possibly worth your time to get a magstripe bank card from a bank like Addison Avenue, because cash withdrawals have no overhead, and cash is still the most widely accepted form of payment for offline shopping/traveling/dining. It's the only way to have certainty that you'll be able to cover all situations.

I've noticed that Eastern Europe is already moving forward with the next emerging payment option: gsm payment. You SMS a keyword to a particular shortcode (short phone number), and you get an auto-reply with a unique code that works for one trip.