Question for you good folk of the Monzo forum.
I’m currently travelling the picturesque countryside of Norway, and so far, card acceptance has been excellent.
After a very long story that I won’t bore you with, we ended up in a small cafe/restaurant last night, that had a card reader which said “Will only accept Norwegian debit cards” - Not deterred, I asked the guy to try my Monzo card (which he did, with a wry smile on his face knowing what the outcome would be), and sure enough, it failed.
Because we are so hip and trendy (and we’d exclusively used card everywhere to this point), we didn’t have any cash on us (our mistake!).
Nearest cash point was half an hour away, and it was already 9pm.
So I had the bright idea to pay the cashier via bank transfer, and then he could pay the business (not sure if he ran the cafe, but he certainly seemed to be making the decisions).
Excellent… all I need is the IBAN number of your bank… Oh… You have no idea what it is, because… well… no one knows (or half the time, has even heard), what an IBAN is.
So that ruled out bank transfer via Monzo/Revolut.
Which finally led us to the devil of all payment systems… PayPal.
It was 10% more expensive, but it worked (the second time, after I had two cancel the initial payment due to a wrong letter in the email address!).
So, wise folk of the internet… Could I have done anything different here?
Or in this (rather specific) example… Does PayPal still reign?
I’ll be travelling through more of Norway today, so likely won’t get on much to check your responses - I’ll certainly be interested to read any advise when I get to the room tonight!
Thanks in advance.