Spike (17) is going on a school trip to Scotland and England in a couple of weeks. We were going over his packing list, and one item stated that Visa and Mastercard were not widely accepted over there. That doesn’t sound right.
I’ve been under the impression that so long as the card has a chip, it should be fine.
Am I right?
Canadian here, but the last time I was in the UK I barely used cash and that was 2019. It was all tap with Visa or Mastercard.
I’m German but have spent several years in the UK at different times in my life, including 2022-33. Credit cards are almost universally accepted in the UK, and that includes Visa and Master. I find it hard to understand where the author of that statement got the idea.
Both are accepted here.
I just returned from a European vacation. My VISA card was accepted pretty much everywhere. If you can get a PIN assigned to it, that will help in a few situations (mostly vending machines, including vending machines that sell train tickets.) PINs aren’t common on US credit cards, but you can often get one by asking for it. I’ve traveled to the UK several times and never had trouble with a US-issued VISA card.
Discover is not widely accepted outside the US.
Thank you, everyone. I was under the impression the UK was largely cashless at this point. That item in the packing list just threw us for a loop.
All I can think is that this is outdated advice based on Europe adopting chip cards (and phasing out magnetic swipe readers) sooner than America.
There are places that do not accept American Express, and Diner’s Club - is that still going - is rarely if ever accepted.
As said above, get cards from either entity with chip and PIN and you will have no problems. You may need to tell your issuers that you are travelling and I strongly advise you to have two cards from different suppliers so that if one is stolen or compromised, you can put a stop on it but still use the other.
Alternatively, you can just get Apple Pay or Google Pay linked to a Master or Visa. That will also work without problems.
I use Amex and I can only remember a few places that didn’t take it. One happened to be this weekend: the Goodwill resale store.
My credit card is on the Visa network, and my bank debit card on Mastercard, and have been for years without problems. These days I almost always use the contactless debit card for almost everything, but occasionally the system will ask me to enter a PIN (presumably to make sure the card’s still with me rather than a malefactor).
Don’t forget to make sure the card issuer/bank knows the card will be used in the UK.
Quite astonishing piece of advice. It’s not even that it’s out of date - Visa and Mastercard have been the default for debit and credit cards in the UK for at least my entire adult life, and I’m in my 50s. Also we are practically cashless at this point, with some shops not accepting cash at all.
The OP was asking about the UK.
I have an Amex card and my local supermarket (Tesco) will not accept it. In practice, I don’t usually bother to ask, I just use it for online purchases.
Both of my CC have stopped doing this. They rely on algorithms to determine if you’re traveling. Worked fine for us on several recent trips.
My credit cards have stopped doing this, but my ATM card, which didn’t need that notification in the past, needs it now.
My bank doesn’t care either, but who knows with American banks?
I would also suggest having the bank’s app on a smartphone so that if they query a purchase, you can easily approve it, and if you need to stop the card, it is much easier to do through the app than by calling. Well - it is with my bank 
I’ve still had it fail. Both my main cards have a place on the ‘my account’ part of the website to report travel. I still do it.
That’s what I thought. Spike was freaking out after reading that. We’d only gotten him £100 cash. I suspect the line item said that some places only take Visa and Mastercard, but he wouldn’t let me see, because, “I can read, Dad!”
Ah, teenagers.
Mine don’t anymore.
The only gotcha, as mentioned was that Europe (and UK) use chip-and-pin and have for a long time. The USA apparently does not typically rely on PIN (Some places used card(chip) with signature rather than PIN.
The other gotcha was when the tech was slowly emerging some banks used longer PINs. IIRC the warning (10 or 15 years ago) was that your charge or debit card should have a 4-digit PIN to be compatible with Europe.
(Back in 2012 I was in the Middle East, and my cards would not work for cash withdrawal at ATM’s (Egypt, Jordan) except for one that apprently read the chip rather than the magnetic stripe. Simple, because the magstripe was too easy to clone. Never had issues in Europe. (In fact an ATM in Hungary let me take out $C700 because I couldn’t count zeroes properly for Hungarian currency)
I did see an item about an ATM in the main square in Vienna where they found a card skimmer to read the stripe and a very thin strip stuck to the top of the ATM opening, that was a video carmea recording to a chip to capture PINs from the keypad. Be aware how your PIN could be recorded or shoulder-surfed.