Travel report (Canada + USA)

I’ve just got back from three weeks travelling around Canada and the US.

I didn’t have a single issue with using my Mondo card anywhere in the Canada - they use chip and pin everywhere and contactless worked too. It seems Canada doesn’t have an upper limit for contactless transactions as the symbol appeared on some supermarket terminals even for $100+ transactions though I only used contactless for smaller payments so I’m not sure if a larger payment would have worked.

However - all ATMs I used (both at banks and on the street) all charged at least CAD$2.50 - $3.50 per transaction which was annoying.

Our brief stop in the US (New York) showed that they still have an insanely screwed up system there. Most street ATMs don’t work because Mondo doesn’t allow for magnetic stripe cash withdrawals and only the major banks (Chase, Bank of America, etc) seem to have ATMs that support chip withdrawals. Again these ATMs charged a few dollars to withdraw cash.

I also had a farcical experience in a small supermarket whereby I used chip and pin (which took about 60 seconds to go through) and then the cashier insisted I signed a receipt as well.

With bars and restaurants there was a mixture of chip+pin payments and magnetic swipe payments which really confuse the Mondo timeline because you’ll see an original transaction (pre-tips) the following day; then you’ll see a second payment (with-tips) a few days later; then you’ll finally see a refund of the first transaction. The Mondo app does have a note about this when you view the original transaction.

Also worth mentioning is that everyone who saw my Mondo card commented on the colour - unlike others on this forum I’ve not actually experienced that in the UK yet.

This was our third trip abroad with Mondo this year where we haven’t taken cash with us and just relied on card transactions and taking money out at ATMs. All in all another great success :smile:

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