Bandicoot

I'm planning my next trip to India in December, and it seems I've heard a fair bit in recent months about the RBI tightening security requirements on credit card payments, so I'm wondering what the current situation is with using US-issued credit cards in India. On my last trip there a few months ago I didn't have occasion to make a credit card payment except at a hotel that's accustomed to foreign visitors and so might well have been better set up for them. Not sure how it is with ordinary shops and other retailers.

1 - Seems like 3D Secure ("Verified by Visa", etc.) is mandatory now in some form - local residents get SMS OTP - does it matter if US card issuers have other ways to provide the OTP (app, email, etc.)? Also, I don't remember having asked any of my credit card issuers to turn on 3D Secure - and it's hard to tell if it's on or not because I don't normally get the interstitial page / OTP request when I use my cards here in the US - do I have to request 3D Secure to be turned on or enabled or something before going to India??

2 - I see in the other thread on using foreign CCs for OTA purchases in India that there is a mix of success and failure - has anyone been able to deduce any patterns there? Is there any recommended best practice that can maximize chances of one's card being accepted for online payments?

3 - Do Google Pay / Apple Pay work well (contactless) for in-person purchases? Or does contactless introduce another layer of complication that might result in card rejections?

4 - Do chip-and-signature cards still work, or should I leave those at home and take along only chip-and-PIN cards? I don't know what to make of all the news articles that talk about the RBI cracking down on "unsafe" modes of payment.

5 - Last question, more of a bit of curiosity - in the past I've seen small retailers in India with Google Pay signs but not supporting contactless payments - it seems to be some kind of QR code system instead - can this be made to work with Google Pay as installed on a US phone? Or is it something that's only available to Google Pay users in India?

Thanks!

Love_Travel

Your question# 5: I couldn’t use US google pay here in Chennai. I think India’s Google pay uses UPI and is different from the US Google pay.

Keyser

I've used my US based cards here a few times & it never asked for an OTP.

No real pattern. It's all hit & miss.

Apple Pay does not work here. Google Pay does but not sure if you can use your US credit card for that.

The whole situation is a mess & the RBI has made it worse. Can't say what will or will not work but in general all US issued cards should work when using them physically.

Google Pay has to be configured to India in order to work here.

legionnaire

US Issued cards work at some and not other retailers. Regardless of Visa or Amex. I carried both and tried one if the other was declined.
Google Pay requires transactions be routed through the UPI network which only supports India based bank accounts and credit cards.

Bandicoot

Thanks for the detailed responses.

Regarding:
and:
...that's a bit disappointing that I can't simply use my phone to pay at a contactless POS terminal, but I guess just a first-world problem in the grand scheme of things - I will of course have my cards with me and it's reassuring to hear that using the card physically does work, at least most of the time. It's odd that the RBI would insist contactless payments be routed through UPI, if that's how we have ended up in this situation. Contactless is a bit more secure than using the physical card, I think, so this is almost forcing foreign cards to be used in less secure modes like chip+signature or magnetic stripe. (Any idea if using the card itself in contactless mode (without Apple Pay / Google Pay) works? And if that does, not sure why Google Pay would be blocked, as far as the terminal is concerned it doesn't "know" that the NFC device presented is a card or a mobile wallet in a phone. Oh, well.

Well, this part I think hasn't changed for years - I've always been surprised at how quickly credit card machines mysteriously go on the fritz or are unavailable or the network is down, when I pull out a US-based credit card to pay with. And at other retailers it's interesting to see them carefully pick just the right machine out of half a dozen they have, presumably to route through the payment processor that has the lowest fees for the kind of card being presented.

So TL;DR for my upcoming trip seems to be, bring along all my cards and a big bag of patience (always packed for trips to India) and see what works.

Thanks.