UK-issued Visa cards & overseas websites

Man_in_seat_61

Help! I'm webmaster of train travel site seat61.com and am trying to find an answer to a problem that's driving me nuts. It's making international train travel around Europe unnecessarily difficult, or at least, expensive.

The problem is this: Visa & Mastercard credit cards are supposed to be international and accepted in Rome or Oslo or Madrid as readily as in London. And if you buy things in person, they are. But try and buy a train ticket direct from Italian Railways at their website www.trenitalia.com (which accepts Visa & Mastercard and is by far the cheapest way to buy Italian train tickets) and your UK-issued credit card will probably fail at the payment stage as they apparently only accept Italian-issued Visa & Mastercard cards, and reject UK-issued ones...

This is a wider issue, as Norwegian Railways www.nsb.no will only accept Norwegian (or at least, Nordic) -issued Visa cards, and I'm getting reports that Spanish Railways www.renfe.es will now only accept Spanish-issued Visa & Mastercard cards, no longer UK-issued ones.

To add another twist, for some reason Trenitalia.com does accept my own First Direct Visa card.

So my questions are:

1. Are some Visa cards more internationally-accepted (i.e. more likely to work on a foreign website) than others, like my own First Direct Visa? Do I really have to advise all train travellers to take out an FD Visa card????

2. Can you simply ask your bank to register your UK-issued Visa card on the official list of Italian-/Norwegian-/Spanish-issued Visa cards so it is recognised as such and works on all these foreign websites?

3. Can you easily obtain genuine Italian-/Norwegian-/Spanish-registered Visa cards from a bank/company in the UK so you can use these websites? Though it's crazy to have to own one Visa card for each country!

4. Any other clever (and preferably practical) solutions to this problem?

5. Does it actually infringe EU law if (for example) Spanish Railways will sell a Madrid-Barcelona train ticket for 49 euros (the special 'Web' fare only available online at www.renfe.es) to a Spanish citizen with a Spanish-issued Visa card but as a Brit with a UK-issued Visa card I'm effectively blocked from buying it so have to call up a UK agency and pay the full normal non-web tariff (more like 110 euros) plus a 10 euro booking fee on top? I thought all EU citizens had to be given access to the same prices?

Any help anyone can shed on this would be appreciated!

Mark.

skyrider007

Cool website!

Anyway, interesting points you have raised there.

1. I think all VISA cards are the same, however cards such as VISA Electron and some type of VISA Debit may be less widely accepted as they require online processing and so on.

2. I don't think so. Each VISA would bear an institutional code which links to the country in which they are issued in.

3. I think that would be difficult as you will normally required to be a resident in each of the countries you mentioned.

4. Ask someone you know with a local card to book the ticket for you?

5. I'm not sure

Happy new Year!

dazza.mk

1-4: as above

5: I doubt this would be breaking EU law, the spanish website is not barring Non-Spanish citizens from purchasing the tickets, rather those not holding Spanish cards (and it may well be the merchant aquiring bank that is rejecting the transactions rather than renfe itself).

Given that its possible (although difficult) for a UK resident to get a Spanish card (www.halifax.es one example) it would be difficult to argue that this is breaking EU law, for something which (by its nature is typically an internal Spanish service).