End of excessive card charges?

[Kendhni]

Story here

To be honest I think this is little more than a bit of a joke pandering to a vociferous bunch of whiners. Where there has been charges that I consider to be excessive, I have used alternative payment methods.

What is worse is the stupidity of statements like 'Under the new rules, payment surcharges will have to reflect the actual cost to the retailer of processing the card transaction.' are a joke. If that truly was the case, or there was a real desire to remove 'excessive' charges, then there would be a flat rate for the transaction and not a percentage charge ... since the true cost of a transaction is the same whether it is £10 or £10000.

I suppose it is one of those things that is better than nothing.

[Silver_Shiney]

I find statements such as "The government says that in 2010, airlines charged passengers up to £350m in card surcharges." unhelpful.

Hmmm... so if we say there were only two passengers who flew that year, they each paid £175 m. Shocking.

But if there were actually 350 million passengers, only £1 each was paid in charges. That's acceptable.

Cobblers


It would bring it more into perspective to quote, say, the cost per passenger for: internal/domestic, short-haul, transatlantic, longer-haul flights, rather than such a meaningless figure.

As we are being driven down the road to a cashless society, card payments are becoming the norm (until we are all forced to be implanted with a scannable chip) so why should we have to pay for the privilege of using them?

[Kendhni]

That would be my attitude SS ... get rid of cash, get rid of cheques and make debit cards, credit cards and direct transfer the main payment methods ... much more economical.
Then all prices could have any transaction charges built in ,,, forcing various payment mechanisms to standardise their pricing model as well.

[Mervyn and Trish]

Not directly related to cruising, because I doubt anyone pays for that in cash these days, but a friend of mine who worked in the supermarket industry explained to me why they don't levy a credit card charge, although they have to pay the CC companies a percentage. It is simply that is costs them more to have cash collected by a security firm and banked than it does to process a credit card. For the same reason they all offer cash back on debit cards these days - a way of offloading cash they receive from other customers without charge. Perhaps if we all started paying cash for our cruises and airline tickets those companies would drop their charges too.

[Capt Black]

I always wondered why I keep getting offered cash back. My local boozer always offers casback on credit cards, I might take them up on it!

[Keechy]

I've always thought that the seller had to pay the CC company a percentage of the transaction? If that's the case, then it would seem that they simply recouping the charge. I only pay the deposit on a credit card to give me the financial cover. The airlines charge an exorbitant fee and that's why there are complaints.

[noddy10]

Never understand the argument about paying a deposit so that they are covered financially. If you book direct or with a TA that is ABTA bonded then your money is safe, I have had a couple of holidays cancelled because holiday company have gone bankrupt but because always booked with TA thats ABTA bonded, which most if not all are these days, we have always got our money back.

[Dancing Queen]

Not directly related to cruising, because I doubt anyone pays for that in cash these days, but a friend of mine who worked in the supermarket industry explained to me why they don't levy a credit card charge, although they have to pay the CC companies a percentage. It is simply that is costs them more to have cash collected by a security firm and banked than it does to process a credit card. For the same reason they all offer cash back on debit cards these days - a way of offloading cash they receive from other customers without charge. Perhaps if we all started paying cash for our cruises and airline tickets those companies would drop their charges too.

That is very true Mervyn, I used to work for a major wholesaler ( I've also worked in the supermarket industry ) our costs for cash/cheque collection and then processing were astronomical, I don't know what the cc companies charge now but back then it was about 1.5% which was far less than processing costs charged by the banks for cash/cheques unfortunately most of the customers were "trade" and many only ever used cash, it wasn't unusual for someone to walk in with a carrier bag containing £10,000.00

[gfwgfw]

Traders are now using a very catchy phase when we punters use a credit/debit card to make a purchase

Convenience fee

How deceptive is that ?