Hello guys.
Tried to rent a car from National Car rental. RAC breakdown car for a few days. They refused to accept Monzo card for a £1 deposit. Asked for a high street bank card…
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Tell them they need to update their BIN database and either accept Mastercard or they don’t.
Report it to monzo acceptance@monzo.com or via chat, and they should be able to resolve it either directly or through Mastercard. Won’t be an immediate fix though, so you’ll need to use another card.
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Most car rental places won’t let you rent without a credit card.
This is not as much the case as it once was. A few years back we went with Sixt because they were only one that would accept debit but these days most I’ve seen will accept a debit.
Never heard of the Monzo issue but I’d imagine that was more of a debit v credit and their belief that Monzo wouldn’t honour any deposit issues.
Enterprise lets you use debit card, I think quite a lot do if you’re not looking for a high end spec vehicle.
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The other problem with debit is that they block quite a lot of your balance. For instance, a hire I had in July blocked nearly twice the total rental upfront.
The £1 will be a valid card check. But I think if you wanted to rent for, say, a week they’d block maybe £500 or more.
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A deposit on a hire car is common, some use credit cards because they don’t want their own money held up (there’s no interest charged on a hold/pending txn on most credit cards).
Definitely credit card is the way to go.
That said, in Crete a couple of years ago they only wanted cash, without a deposit. Didn’t take cards at all!
Possibly around the time the country hit very hard times.
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Indeed. They had very low withdrawal limits on their own accounts at the time so they needed the cash to pay their own suppliers. Touch inconvenient for tourists who had withdrawal limits on free withdrawals on their own accounts though.
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I used my Monzo card about four years ago with Enterprise with no issues whatsoever.
Can’t imagine you can do two weeks at £16 day anymore though 
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The Greek law making card acceptance obligatory was passed in 2016.
Basically any business (with very few exceptions) not accepting cards is breaking the law, and you can report them to the government, easiest thing would be to call the police from your phone when in the shop (it probably wouldn’t elicit an immediate response but it would sure as hell scare the law-breaking shop owner to bits).
The best thing to do then is take your business elsewhere, it is best not to support tax-evading business owners that are in great part responsible for the mess the country is in.
If they told you that, they lied. They can pay their suppliers via bank transfer, no limits there.
They didn’t tell me that. I looked it up and, as far as I could tell, in 2018 they couldn’t do unlimited bank transfers either. Back then it was ATM withdrawal limit of EUR60 a week.