MSE News: Ryanair to charge for Visa Electron bookings

digitaltoast

I see you lot are already well ahead here, but I see Entropay are sending out emails now:

Ryanair recently announced that Visa Electron payment cards, such as EntroPay’s Virtual Visa, will start attracting a £5 administration charge effective 1 January 2010 and MasterCard Prepaid cards will become the sole form of free payment.

Good news! You don’t need to seek another payment method in order to avoid future fees. Simply upgrade to an EntroPay Plastic MasterCard!

circuit

This is really annoying because I have £9.92 on an Entropay card for buying Ryanair flights to Spain which I now can't withdraw without paying a £3 fee.

If I convert it to a Mastercard it will cost me £4.99.

Bad form on Entropay and Ryanair's parts. Think it's time to dump both companies for good.

cannyscot_2

circuit wrote: »

This is really annoying because I have £9.92 on an Entropay card for buying Ryanair flights to Spain which I now can't withdraw without paying a £3 fee.

If I convert it to a Mastercard it will cost me £4.99.

Bad form on Entropay and Ryanair's parts. Think it's time to dump both companies for good.

but you can just buy something online with your 9.92 and have no charges.

entropay m/c still maybe has an advantage for 1p flights-i book about 40 a year so then the $5 is worth it.

j0annepsi

Mine is 5415, that's always the start of the number generated by my virtual pre-paid MC.

j0annepsi

nbaki82 wrote: »

I have contacted Neteller's support and they promised to get in touch with Ryanair to solve the solution.

What did they say to you? I was in touch with them last night and they said Ryanair.com had never even attempted to debit my net+ card, apart from the one instance where I said it was a regular mastercard.

Looks like it's definitely an issue with Ryanair! You'd think they would have tested this out before blowing their trumpets about accepting the pre-paid MC!

JPD23

JPD23 wrote: »

As I said, the only "downside" is that it takes 2-3 days to load via the free method

I did a faster payment into Neteller's London Barclays account last night and this evening had e-mail confirmation the funds had been added to my Neteller account. Almost exactly 24hrs between the two, so not as long as I had envisaged.

Of course if Ryanair's financial system doesn't recognise the 5415 prefix as a pre-paid Mastercard then that is not good news! Let's hope this is sorted soon by Neteller...!

Edit - I did find the attached document, but it doesn't seem to differentiate between Mastercard pre-paid or credit card number prefixes. It only mentions "Mastercard DR" (debit cards?) and "Mastercard"

http://www.barclaycard.co.uk/business/documents/pdfs/bin_rules.pdf

PolishBigSpender

All this hassle over cards - if you can't afford the card fee, why not simply book with someone else? Seems much easier than spending hours attempting to save a few pounds.

j0annepsi

PolishBigSpender wrote: »

All this hassle over cards - if you can't afford the card fee, why not simply book with someone else? Seems much easier than spending hours attempting to save a few pounds.

I'm not sure if you're being rude or trolling. If you have a problem with people trying to 'save a few pounds', perhaps the moneySAVINGexpert.com forum isn't the forum for you??

It's £10 per person per return journey on each booking, and some of us fly a lot. Personally I fly 1-2 times per month, usually with Ryanair. I like to do so as cheaply as possible.

Neteller doesn't cost me ANYTHING to join, their depositing fees are very low and let's not forget the problem with booking Ryanair flights is a problem with Ryanair, not Neteller...

PolishBigSpender

j0annepsi wrote: »

I'm not sure if you're being rude or trolling. If you have a problem with people trying to 'save a few pounds', perhaps the moneySAVINGexpert.com forum isn't the forum for you??

I'm suggesting that the endless hassle over trying to find cards that work with Ryanair, with the endless comparison between cards and problems with booking - is it really worth 10 pounds per person for the time wasted?

j0annepsi

PolishBigSpender wrote: »

I'm suggesting that the endless hassle over trying to find cards that work with Ryanair, with the endless comparison between cards and problems with booking - is it really worth 10 pounds per person for the time wasted?

What's wrong with finding a card with a good rate? It's not a big deal, it took me about half an hour to find Neteller to be the card with the lowest fees, less than 24 hours in total to get my account up and running, and their customer service is superb.

They are liasing with Ryanair's payment processor today to resolve this issue which, again, is with Ryanair, not Neteller.

The whole ethos of this website is to save money, and yes, I think it *is* worth a tiny amount of effort to save money on flights.