Is a EU VISA Debit card equivalent to a US VISA Credit card in practical aspects of tourism in the US?

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"VISA" and "VISA Debit" cards should work fine with the chip or magnetic stripe at almost any payment terminal in the US, and at virtually every ATM. Contactless may or may not work depending on the specific terminal. "VISA Electron" cards won't work for payments, but can be used at ATMs.

Sometimes a payment terminal will ask if your card is a debit card (or credit card). In this case you should always answer no (or credit) even if your non-US card is a debit card. The US "debit" card network is an artifact going far back to the early days of US ATM cards, and piggybacks payment processing on top of ATM networks instead of the VISA/MC/AMEX etc. networks.

Upvote:2

Visa, in the United States, used to have a requirement that merchants accepting either credit or debit must accept the other product. However, due to a 2003 antitrust lawsuit and settlement brought forth by retailers, this "honor all cards" policy was dropped.

While the vast majority of merchants will accept both, there is no requirement to do so. Due to lower rates, US merchants will usually try to settle debit cards through a PIN-based interbank network (STAR, Cirrus, Plus, etc) before Visa Debit.

Upvote:4

One issue might be the amount of funds available. For a car rental, they may want to make a large reservation to cover the deposit and other potential extra charges. This might not be possible with a debit card. At the least, you may need a large balance for this reason and, even if you have that balance, it might not be possible or desirable for the rental company to reserve a large amount.

You could try offering to pay the expected charges on your debit card but use a credit card for the deposit. If nothing bad happens then there will be no charge on your credit card.

The last time that I rented a car in the US, the expected charges had been prepaid but I still needed to present a credit card for the deposit. Nothing bad happened so there was no charge on the card.

Upvote:7

This is a follow-up of my question, with some practical aspects back from my trip.

  • the debit VISA card was readily accepted by the cashiers in all the shops, hotels, museums, ...
  • it worked in most of them:
    • in some places I was asked to put the card in the reader, chip first - as I do at home. When doing this the payment was successful 100% of times.
    • in some places the magnetic strip was ran though the reader (by the cashier or by me when instructed to do so), this worked in almost all the cases:
      • usually the bank accepted and I was asked to sign
      • a few times, the reader asked for my PIN (and the cashier also asked for a signature, probably "just in case")
      • once the cashier kept retrying when they saw "type PIN" and I was getting frantic feedback from my bank on my watch that a transaction was aborted. This is how I learned that they were trying to go through with the payment with repeated magnetic strip slides, but did not understand what "type your PIN" means (I know that this was not malicious)

Car rental was not an issue.

The most complicated part was at the automatic (pump) payment in gas stations, especially some older ones and usually Chevron. That was when I was greeted with the question on the display "Is this card a DEBIT card?"

  • if I answered "yes" then the transaction was always aborted and I had to go to the cashier's desk
  • if I answered "no", most of the times the transaction went through. It however failed when I was sometimes asked for my ZIP code (I know this is an artisanal was of somehow checking whether the card is OK, by comparing what is typed to the ZIP of the city or bank of issuance (do not remember which one)). I tried 99999 and 00000 and both failed.

Finally - contactless payment always failed, both on the card and on my phone (which has the card configured in Samsung pay and Google Pay)

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