On 25 May 2006 01:59:08 -0700, "Neil Williams"
wrote:
[...]
That is really rather silly. Did you have any experience the other way
around - i.e. do UK Maestro cards work fine abroad? (I wouldn't know -
mine's a Visa Delta, but for various reasons, mainly due to fraud
susceptibility, I vastly prefer to pay by credit than debit cards).

My card has worked fine almost everywhere, and I've happily
chipped-and-PINned in France, and PINned elsewhere, since before it
was a Maestro. The exception is the Paris metro, which won't accept
it at all. French ticket machines were always very Francophile,
although maybe the SNCF machines are better now, I haven't tried one
in a while. Before, I couldn't even collect a ticket that had already
been paid for on the web, with a UK card.

I think it's less the bank systems now and more a human problem - I
was once asked to sign a receipt in Zurich that didn't have a space
for a signature, because I'd used the PIN, and a Visa credit card was
almost rejected by a Parisian restaurant because the terminal demanded
that the chip be read and the waiter insisted on swiping it instead.

After a decade or more of thinking that foreign cards must be swiped,
France is slowly coming around to the idea that they are the all the
same now. But if there's no proper training, people will stick with
what they know.

I've had no problems in Belgium or Germany...

Richard.