French petrol holding charge

[HoldenCarver (Nick)]

Things haven’t improved much since 2018, then:

Automatic payments at fuel stations in France

Hi all. Newbie here. I do a lot of travelling in France and most fuel stations are self service. Yesterday I bought 35 euros of diesel, went out for lunch and then my card was declined because the garage had obviously “blocked” much more than that from my card. Highly embarrassing as I didn’t have enough cash and I’d never been to that restaurant before! It turns out they “block” 120 euros every time and it can take 7 days for them to refund the difference. So I am now stuffed for money till th…

Sorry to hear that you’ve had so much money ringfenced. Hopefully it gets released in a timely fashion.