Recently travelled to Germany and they don’t seem to use contactless payment. Instead for small transactions they insert your card and take payment this way which don’t require your PIN number. This caused problems As Monzo rejected this payment but it did say I could try again and asked me to authenticate the transaction. The problem with this method is I had to have every transaction declined before i could authenticate to make the purchase, which is both baffling to the store person and annoying for me.
Travelling to USA i know you can enable the mag strip for purchases but surely there can be similar method when travelling to countries that don’t have contactless yet.
I’ve been to Deutschland a few times using Monzo and they definitely widely accept contactless with no issues.
This makes it sound more like you reached your contactless limit and needed to complete a transaction via chip and pin to re-enable contactless.