A miracle occurred and I am going to England in June! Land of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Harry Potter! Douglas Adams, Monty Python, Bridget Jones, to say nothing of the dog!
Anyway, how much of a pain is the difference in credit card technology? Is it getting better or worse? I’ll mostly be in London with one trip each to Canterbury and Oxford.
Feel free to add on any advice for bumbling little-traveled Americans.
I took my Visa card with me on a trip last fall. The only time I had trouble with it was when I tried to buy a ticket from an automated kiosk at the Penzance rail station. It wouldn’t read my card and I wound up feeding cash into the machine to pay for the ticket instead.
Most POS terminals can accept the swipe and sign type cards, though they’re not common here so the cashiers might not know how to do it. ATMs should be no problem at all, but I would set your PIN to a 4-digit one if it’s not already, and memorise it as numbers since you might find that ATM keys don’t have letters on them like they do in the US.
I just got back from the UK. Pretty much every place I went, they were able to swipe my card instead of using the chip and pin reader, although some people were a little confused by it and a lot of places didn’t have pens handy for signing with.
If you want my advice, get a pile of cash and use that as much as possible. I found that it became kind of a pain in the ass to keep having to explain every time, “No, no, you can’t put it in the chip reader, there’s no chip. I have to swipe,” etc. Although possibly in the more touristy areas they’re more used to it and it won’t be as annoying. I spent most of my time in and around Nottingham.
The only time I have problem throughout Europe is the train ticket kiosks, with the exception of the Heathrow Express and Tube kiosks in London, those worked fine with my non-chip and pin card. No problems in restaurants, hotels, ATM’s, gift shops, etc. Otherwise mention to the cashier that you are from the US and don’t have a chip and pin.
We found you could only use a swipe card 1x per day to top off “Oyster Card” (Underground RFID fare card), otherwise you have to use swipe card at manned station in “The Tube”.
Otherwise almost everyone would take a swipe card. Do them a favor and carry your own pen. Wait and Counter-staff seemed to appreciate my having a pen at hand, as they are not used to providing one at the cash register or when they bring around the mobile wireless credit card thing.
We got a special Capital One card which had no exchange service fee.
We also got a debit card from our bank because it was reputed to be better than ATM card for cash withdrawls. Not sure if that was true.