My daughter has had trouble with both the debit card and the credit card because they lack a "chip" in Dublin grocery stores. Also, when booking flights, she has had to use my credit card when Ryanair and AerLIngus wouldn't take the debit card. Ryanair said it doesn't accept "solo" card. I can't figure out what do do to help her. Do you have any advice?

The chip/pin issue is becoming more common. However, all merchants are required to accept non chip/pin cards; unfortunately, not all clerks know how to do so. Sometimes there is a "no pin" or "signature button"; sometimes pressing cancel or waiting for it to timeout when "enter pin" is displayed will have the transaction go through for a signature purchase.

Here is some info from the Visa website:
http://www.usa.visa.com/personal/using_visa/european_travel_tips.html?it=c|/personal/using_visa/travel_with_visa.html|European%20Travel%20Tips%20

[B]call your issuing bank's branch manager as many US banks have commercial relationships with foreign banks and many of the debit/credit card numbers have to be coded internally into the network to get cash abroad[./B]

An example of this is Bank of America has a business relationship with Scotia bank in Canada, but you have to call customer service and report you want to use it abroad and give them a timeframe how long you'll be away.

It is a security feature to block unauthorized charges being made with a stolen debit/credit card abroad.

There are national credit cards which you shouldn't have problems, such as AMEX, Chase, CitiBank, for example.

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.

It's all an effin' mess, at least here in England (can't imagine Ireland being too different). In theory, if an establishment accepts cards, they should accept all 3 versions (traditional signature, chip and signature, and chip and PIN). In practice, however, the situation ranges from "sure, no problem, we can take all sorts of cards" (usually the case at tourist-friendly places like hotels), through to "umm wait I need to ask my manager how to do this" (often happens at pubs, hypermarkets, and generally places with a lot of tills and highish turnover), to "sorry, mate, our policy is to only take chip cards" (low-cost supermarkets often do this. In particular, Aldi, Lidl, and Netto all have such a policy).
If I didn't have a chip card, I'd have to miss out on a few cheap groceries, but I reckon I could still get by fine without having to carry cash around.

My advice would, therefore, be to stick to the well-known, big retailers who are all used to this type of thing.
As for airlines, it's not like one would normally ever want to fly Ryanair, so maybe it's doing her good instead.


I have quite a few actually.

Sorry, I left out a country: within the US there are not any chip/pin MC/Visa cards being issued. (If you can tell me a bank that offers one, let me know...)