Prepaid Travel Cards guide

I understand with Revolut there is no ATM fees on withdrawals up to £200 in value per calendar month, and 2% fee applies above that.

By this definition of calendar month will mean if your trip span over two different Month (say end of February until first week of March) you will have quota of 2x£200 = £400 (e.g one in Feb and one in March).

Does anyone have personal experience to use Revolut in this way and their system does not charge you a fee of 2% ??

There is a lot of angst about this on TrustPilot. Unaware of all of the complaints we used one recently to travel to Australia and New Zealand.

From direct experience our issues include:

1/ When applying for the Card the system corrupted our address. We complained and were told to send two documents confirming our address before they would send the Card. However a couple of days later the Card was delivered (with £500 loaded on to it) - TO THE WRONG ADDRESS. Luckily the postman intercepted it and delivered it to us. So much for the checking of the validity of an applicant's address.
2/ Loading fee(s) and exchange rates were a ripoff
3/ Nationwide / VISA declined all attempts to reload the Card whilst in those countries despite a massive balance in our bank account(s)
4/ Expedia declined the card for accommodation and flight bookings despite the loading being well topped up
5/ Also we couldn't choose currency payments with Expedia - we wished to pay in AU$ or NZ$ - but payments were declined anyway
6/ In both countries we had to use a local SIM to keep phone costs down, however the respective tel. nos. weren't registered with the P.O. - there was no way to do this - so we couldn't obtain the PIN no. for the card using SMS (we had inadvertently deleted the original SMS text). This meant that we could only use the Card for purchasing small goods using 'touch in.'
7/ Contacting Customer Service required calling UK-based nos. at great cost - we didn't bother
8/ Even if logged into our account emails to Customer Service re: the Card did not end up with the Support Team - but had to be forwarded by a General PO CS agent first; this delayed any response
9/ Frequently responses did not address the issue of concern
10/ There was an average 10-day response time for requests for help - useless for when things went wrong whilst travelling
11/ And any response always started "Dear Cxxxx" - what right have they to use my Christian name as part of a communication about unsatisfactory service?
12/ On our return to the UK trying to analyse our spending, we wanted to download in CSV format our transaction history; but apparently this is not possible.

However the biggest issue was that Nationwide declined to allow us to top up or reload the Card whilst we were travelling. It appears that banks are deliberately sabotaging such Cards in order to keep charging extortionate currency exchange / transfer fees. Complaints about this to the P.O. were ignored. Nationwide will pay the price in the complete closure of all of our accounts and the withdrawal of all our investments in favour of a more customer oriented bank.

CJB666 wrote: »

Unaware of all of the complaints we used one recently to travel to Australia and New Zealand.

Having eventually discovered that you are probably referring to the Post Office Travel Card (edit: maybe you identified it with a header but I don't see it using mobile) - I'm sorry to hear that you were somehow enticed into using one of the worst possible choices for travel.

It would not cost more and probably be cheaper to use your regular bank debit card, without the various issues and bad service of the PO card and without having excess foreign currency that will cost you again to redeem.

There's plenty of info on MSE about the best card solutions for travel.