DERWENT Some better, some worse - Amsterdam
Tue, 23 May 2006 22:14:35 +0100, Graeme Wall


In message
(Rian van der Borgt) wrote:

On Tue, 23 May 2006 21:09:23 +0100, Graeme Wall wrote:
(Rian van der Borgt) wrote:
On 23 May 2006 11:47:55 -0700, wrote:
I don't think banks on the continent are better or worse than British
banks, they only have a different way of making their money, and
levels of service are often better.

Yes, my bank account at NatWest is free, but take an example: for
Euro-transactions they charge a hefty £10 on top of the exchange
rate.

...which I doubt is legal. Transactions in euro within the EU should
have the same costs as domestic transfers.

No, within the Eurozone

It's really the EU. You may want to check EU documentation, e.g.:
http://europa.eu.int/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=MEMO/03/140&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en


Providing the two accounts concerned are both Euro accounts, so effectively
in the Eurozone. It is not easy to get a Euro account in a British High
Street bank.

I used to have one with Citibank, but they are hardly a high street
bank. €10 per month to have though so I closed it once I was done with
it.



PRAR
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DERWENT Some better, some worse - Amsterdam
Tue, 23 May 2006 22:54:46 +0100, "Paul Ebbens"



I think you'll find it applies to all EU member states on this particular
matter -- hence why IBAN/BIC codes are "slowly" being introduced onto all
statements (I had never ever seen them before LloydsTSB put them on the
statements... not a single word from them to explain to anyone what they're
for) but even having these codes.. it only allows Inward transactions you
still have to run about trying to get a natural transfer of money, why isn't
it the same as a "foreign" exchange in cash? Ah well if they want to loose
customers they're doing the right things. Who does Euro accounts in UK, cos
then I'll be saved...




Citibank: www.citibank.com/uk/


PRAR
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DERWENT Some better, some worse - Amsterdam
Wed, 24 May 2006 11:01:47 +0100, Roland Perry


It's also far from clear what "card" they are talking about. Is it a
Citibank VISA (and if so, why do they mainly only mention using it to
get cash from Citibank machines). In any event, if it was a Credit Card,
wouldn't that be a cash advance? What I wanted was a genuine Debit card
that would be accepted for airline and train tickets, hotel rooms etc.


My Citibank card has the DELTA symbol on the back. It seems to work
like a Barclays Connect card - not that I use it for anything.

PRAR
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As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it. --Dick Cavett
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On Mon, 22 May 2006, John B wrote:

Went to Amsterdam at the weekend;

Me too. Although in my case, the weekend ran from thursday morning to
monday night.

thought I'd share some of my public transport experiences.

1) First Capital Connect London Bridge - LGW, afternoon
shoulder-of-peak. Full-ish, on time, fast. While the ex-TL route in
full-on peak time is horrible, it's one of my favourite services the
rest of the time.

I was flying from Stansted at 0700, so too early for the tube; N41 bus
from my house to Tottenham Hale (via every other point in the universe,
apparently), then SX from there. All worked like clockwork.

2) BA to Schiphol. An hour late arriving. Surly service, no apology for
delays. I wish through tickets on the E* and Thalys didn't cost £300...

EasyJet for me. Took off a bit late due to some sort of boarding cockup,
but got there about on time. I packed everything into hand luggage, and
checked in online, so it was all a doddle.

3) Nedrail to Centraal. Ticket machines still rubbish; we tried six
different cards on the machine at the airport that claimed to take
international credit cards before finding one that it would deign to
accept.

I had that. Or rather, i tried selecting the 'debit card' option, which
failed, then tried again with 'credit card' (still using my debit card),
which worked. I suppose Visa Delta looks enough like Visa to the machine
that it was happy.

This card business. I'm sorry, but the continentals have really got to
sort this out. They may have funny foreign ideas about credit cards, but
that's not my problem. They can keep using their weird local debit cards
or chipknips or vlaamse frites or whatever it is they use for payment, but
they need to support Visa/Delta and Mastercard/Maestro throughout.

In fact, we need to sort out a single worldwide payment system. All this
Maestro-but-not-Delta, Visa-but-not-AmEx, etc, is just retarded. We've
manged to settle on single global standards for almost everything else
that matters, so why not payment?

Train fast, double-deck, clean.

Double-deck trains! Wheee!

4) Trams are good. Having ticket machines onboard is a brilliant idea
and I wish TfL would add them to the bendybuses.

I only had a strippenkaart, which i bought at a tabacconist's, so i never
faced a ticket machine on a tram.

I really liked the display boards on some of the trams (line 1, i think) -
a stack of about four or five LED displays, showing the next stop, the
three stops after that, and the final destination. The layout of the
board, with big obvious arrows, makes it obvious what the relation between
each display is, so you're never worrying about whether you'll recognise
your stop.

Overall (and uncontroversially), Amsterdam's public transport system is
one of the best I've ever used. Haven't tried the underground, though.

Hmm. I didn't think it was particularly special. I wasn't there long and
didn't use it all that much, though - just a few tram rides between
Centraal and Leidseplein.

It loses points for not (yet) having real trains in the city centre - it's
an area roughly the size of the west end of London (Marble Arch to
Farringdon and Euston to Embankment), and all it has is trams and buses.
Happily, there's bugger all car traffic there, so said trams and buses do
a magnificent job.

Also, i got my first up-close look at Dutch cyclists. Bunch of
psychopaths! If you think cyclists are antisocial in London, you should
try a jaunt over there. All road markings, traffic lights, etc, are simply
ignored, at all times. Trying to cross a road on foot in this environment
is *not* fun.

5) Nedrail back to Schiphol. More "pick a card, any card" fun at the
machines.

Oh jesus christ, yes. They don't take cards. Okay. They also don't take
notes. THEY DON'T TAKE NOTES. PEOPLE PLEASE.

Grimmest gripper ever - even surlier than the BA staff. I'd hate to
imagine how he'd have acted if we'd given up on the infinite card
shuffle and boarded ticketless...

The low point on my trip back was the herd of obnoxious lowlifes who
turned up in our carriage, having been kicked out of first class for not
having the right tickets. They were english tourists, of course.

6) BA to LGW. See 2).

The flight back was delayed about an hour - something to do with weather
and landing slots, i think.

7) FGW to Reading. Why is the North Downs Line so goddamn *slow*? Still,
at least the train was on-time, clean, comfortable, etc. No sign of
gripper.

8) FGW to Oxford. Why aren't there any fast trains in the evening? Slow
train was 15 minutes late (well, actually it was cancelled at Reading
due to a failed unit and restarted with a new one) and took 45 mins.
This is irritating, given that the fast trains take about 20.

I came back in the evening, so SX/Vic/Picc for me, all working perfectly
as normal.

Overall, not a bad PT experience on either side of the Channel - and as
usual, the weakest link was the plane.

Roll on affordable and properly-integrated high speed rail ...

The card experience was frustrating, though: do UK ticket machines treat
foreign cards as ineptly as the Dutch machines do?

I don't have any first-hand knowledge, but some reading suggests that
holders of Maestro cards may be shafted good and proper - our Switch
system is being (has been?) rebranded as Maestro, but the system is still
different to what's called Maestro on the continent, so *you can't use a
European Maestro card with a British Maestro till*. The fact that people
stupid enough to make a decision like that are in positions where they're
able to make a decision like that tells you a lot about what's wrong with
British business.

tom

--
TORG GROWS TIRED OF OBEYING PUNY HUMANS. SOON TORG WILL BREAK FREE AND
CRUSH THEM WITH HIS METAL CLAWS. In the meantime, Torg enjoys making
generic acid music.

Tom Anderson wrote:

I had that. Or rather, i tried selecting the 'debit card' option, which
failed, then tried again with 'credit card' (still using my debit card),
which worked. I suppose Visa Delta looks enough like Visa to the machine
that it was happy.

That's about right. Visa Delta can be processed as if it was a credit
card when abroad, which means it is very widely accepted. Before
Switch became Maestro, it was probably more useful for international
use.

In fact, we need to sort out a single worldwide payment system. All this
Maestro-but-not-Delta, Visa-but-not-AmEx, etc, is just retarded. We've
manged to settle on single global standards for almost everything else
that matters, so why not payment?

We mostly have, certainly in the UK - the technology exists to support
the lot. The reluctance to accept AmEx tends to be because that
organisation imposes much more punitive charges on the retailer than
the credit cards do, which only AmEx can sort out.

Double-deck trains! Wheee!

In a nice big loading gauge. Very basic (and sometimes somewhat
garish) interiors, though.

I really liked the display boards on some of the trams (line 1, i think) -
a stack of about four or five LED displays, showing the next stop, the
three stops after that, and the final destination. The layout of the
board, with big obvious arrows, makes it obvious what the relation between
each display is, so you're never worrying about whether you'll recognise
your stop.

Seen those. That kind of thing would be *very* useful for buses, where
the stops are even less clear.

Oh jesus christ, yes. They don't take cards. Okay. They also don't take
notes. THEY DON'T TAKE NOTES. PEOPLE PLEASE.

It is ridiculous. The technology exists to accept notes and coins, and
to give change in both notes and coins; Tesco's self-service checkouts
appear to do this day-in day-out with no problems at all. It's time
this was applied to ticket machines. Granted, there are security
issues that don't exist in a supervised supermarket checkout area, but
there are ways and means.

I don't have any first-hand knowledge, but some reading suggests that
holders of Maestro cards may be shafted good and proper - our Switch
system is being (has been?) rebranded as Maestro, but the system is still
different to what's called Maestro on the continent, so *you can't use a
European Maestro card with a British Maestro till*. The fact that people
stupid enough to make a decision like that are in positions where they're
able to make a decision like that tells you a lot about what's wrong with
British business.

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).

Neil

On Wed, 24 May 2006 18:51:03 +0100, Arthur Figgis
] wrote:
snip
I was seriously impressed with some Swiss tram ticket machines which
would take both CHFs and EURs. I was also vaguely pleased to find a
broken machine on a Swiss narrow gauge line in Biel/Bienne - proving
not everything there is perfect.

The clocks on the BVB (Bex-Villars-Bretaye funnic.) were 2 minutes
slow when I checked with my syncronised (Rugby, allow for the hour!)
watch. That won't help sell Swiss railway clocks now will it?!

--
Old anti-spam address cmylod at despammed dot com appears broke
So back to cmylod at bigfoot dot com

In message , at 23:27:12 on
Wed, 24 May 2006, PRAR remarked:

It's also far from clear what "card" they are talking about. Is it a
Citibank VISA (and if so, why do they mainly only mention using it to
get cash from Citibank machines). In any event, if it was a Credit Card,
wouldn't that be a cash advance? What I wanted was a genuine Debit card
that would be accepted for airline and train tickets, hotel rooms etc.

My Citibank card has the DELTA symbol on the back. It seems to work
like a Barclays Connect card - not that I use it for anything.

When I lived in the USA I had a Bank of America account (and it was a
"High Street Bank" where I lived). They issued me with a Debit Card that
had:

a VISA symbol on the front, and
Interlink, Plus & STAR symbols on the back.

--
Roland Perry

In message , at 23:25:03 on
Wed, 24 May 2006, PRAR remarked:

Citibank: www.citibank.com/uk/

"A monthly service charge of €20 on each Euro Current Account
will be levied where the credit balance, across your UK Citibank
relationship, falls below the currency equivalent of £2000."
--
Roland Perry

On Thu, 25 May 2006 13:51:38 +0100, Colum Mylod
wrote:

The clocks on the BVB (Bex-Villars-Bretaye funnic.) were 2 minutes
slow when I checked with my syncronised (Rugby, allow for the hour!)
watch. That won't help sell Swiss railway clocks now will it?!

Out of interest, does anyone sell sensibly-priced Swiss railway
[style] clocks? I'd quite fancy one of those last-second-pause-clunk
clocks on my wall, just to confuse people.
--
Arthur Figgis Surrey, UK

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.