Patagonia 2006

Did you know that if you took your credit cards from home and started using them in a foreign country, you could be subject to having your transactions refused and your card ripped up by a suspicious salesperson?

Before you go, call the customer service number on the back of the credit cards you intend to take with you and notify them:

• What countries you are planning to visit
• The start and end date of your trip
• The type of expenditures you plan to use it for, such as hotels, restaurants, transportation, museum admissions, shopping, etc.

It’s never nice to suddenly lose access to your principal source of funds on your vacation, especially when a couple of phone calls will do the trick.

On a related topic, I usually get an extra ATM card to take with me in case a machine chews up one of them. (By the way, if a machine chews up your primary card, there is a good chance that it’ll do the same to your secondary card: Look for another ATM to be safe.) Several weeks ago, I told an officer at Bank of America that foreign machines sometimes like to chew on American cards (must be the trans-fats), and he readily had an extra one sent to me.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 30th, 2006 at 8:46 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.