Maestro Cards

jennyrobyn

Are there any UK accounts still issuing Maestro Cards? We were recently in Holland and found many supermarkets would not take either our Visa debit or Mastercard Credit card.
I am not sure IF a mastercard debit card would have worked though. They were very specific that it had to be Maestro. I dont particularly want to use a pre paid card if I can help it.
Any ideas?

WAYT

Forget about it. Even if you found an obscure bank that still distributes them, you'd still have the problem of having to pay forex charges etc
Better to use a fee free card of any ilk, to withdraw from an ATM and pay with cash.

Metro Bank debit is most useful in that respect.

eDicky

Even a UK issued Maestro card, if it exists, would probably not be accepted by Dutch retailers outside tourist areas and department stores etc. MasterCard debit and any prepaid cards are also useless in most local shops and supermarkets.

In the Netherlands there is no marketing hype culture of cashback and rewards etc for using cards, and retailers don't stand for any interchange fees that are used by card companies to fund them, unless they can offset the fees by higher prices where many customers are foreign card users.

Just use cash, withdrawn using a fee-free card from an ATM. But take care before ordering something in a neighborhood cafe, some don't even take cash for security reasons and accept only the Maestro card that every Dutch person carries.

jennyrobyn

Thanks. It was notable that the supermarket we were using regularly had not had UK ' tourists' in but they were very helpful, and yes we did pop out and get cash. It did get us wondering if this situation is likely to pop up in other EU countries. We normally are in France, and have no problem there