Supercard from Travelex is now available – the end of FX credit card charges?

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.

• Rob says:

  14 May14 May 10:09

  If you have a PO or Halifax card, you can now ditch it (freeing up credit and having one less bill to pay) AND start earning points on your overseas spend. It would also make it easier to hit spend targets such as £10k for Hilton Gold on their Visa.

  If you have the Lloyds card, you can now save £24 by ditching it. If your holiday hotels accept Amex then, admittedly, you might want to keep it anyway as the rate is still good. Given how poor the MasterCard rate is on the Lloyds card, though, you’d be better off redirecting that spend to a Tesco MasterCard via Supercard.

  • Mark says:

    14 May14 May 17:31

    Maybe not. It depends on how much worse the Visa vs MasterCard rates are on average. If the 1-2% I found yesterday is at all indicative earning an additional 0.35avios/£ would mean you are effectively paying between 3 and 6p/avios when directing the spend to a standard Tesco MasterCard via Supercard vs the Lloyds card.

    The £24/year is likely to be easily recoverable via Amex deals.

    • Rob says:

      14 May14 May 23:33

      I would be surprised if the rates differ based on what they have said. Only way to check this, of course, is to make 2 identical transactions in the same shop at the same time with two different cards.

      • Mark says:

        15 May15 May 14:05

        I think I may previously have been looking at the Visa Inc rates, not Visa Europe (which I’m assuming is what will be applied).

        Taking yesterday’s rates for a GBP card, one Euro would have cost:

        MasterCard: 72.39p
        Visa: 72.10p
        Amex: 72.30p

        So Visa in this instance would have been a little cheaper (~0.4%).

        One US dollar would have cost:

        MasterCard: 63.25p
        Visa: 63.98p
        Amex: 63.98p

        So here Visa and Amex are both about 1.2% more expensive than Mastercard.

        Going back a week, the Euro rates on 7/5 were:

        MasterCard: 74.23p
        Visa: 74.18p
        Amex: 74.57p

        So, again very little in it but Visa is cheaper.

        For US dollars, again on 7/5:

        MasterCard: 65.60p
        Visa: 66.09p
        Amex: 66.05p

        Visa here was about 0.7% more expensive than Mastercard.

        It’s difficult to do a wider analysis without an easy way to harvest the rates in bulk. We’re talking about very small amounts of money of course unless your overseas spend is huge, but in the context of whether (and how much) you could be paying for any points return it could be material.

      • Mark says:

        15 May15 May 18:04

        From the Terms and Conditions it is the Visa Europe rate:

        “5.8. Supercard will not charge additional fees or FX mark-up for a foreign transaction and the Visa Europe Exchange Rate will be used to convert foreign transactions to GBP.”

        So on that basis the comparison immediately above should be indicative, and therefore doesn’t compare as badly as I first thought.

• Martin says:

  14 May14 May 10:26

  I tried all day from yesterday morning until the early hours of the morning and could not complete registration. Must have tried 200+ times.

  My partner on the other hand got it done in a handful of attempts yesterday afternoon.

• Max says:

  14 May14 May 10:57

  I tried again today and was able to successful register (I was also one of those who pre-registered my interested a while ago). Maybe they’ve ironed out some of the IT glitches from yesterday.

• Max says:

  14 May14 May 12:10

  It took me many attempts to get through the screens as it often said there was an error but I’m there now and awaiting my card in the post

• roger says:

  14 May14 May 12:43

  I’d never heard of it until I saw it on the MSE website. I managed to register eventually and have an email saying it’s on it’s way. Hurrah. Lucky me hey?

  • Roger says:

    14 May14 May 14:58

    This Roger HAD heard of Supercard and pregistered some weeks ago. After I saw Raffles’s news, I applied using his link and ultimately succeeded.

    Then got the message from pre-registration telling me the offer was live and all I needed to do was register.

    Not joined up …

• JoshUK says:

  14 May14 May 12:50

  I’m in the same boat as a couple of people above–got through all the details to final screen (choosing password, etc) and couldn’t get through. But now when I open the app, it simply says “Congratulations, Your SUPERCARD is now in the post and on the way to you…”

  Still no emails though. Anyone else in this boat actually contact Travelex and find out the situation?

  Thanks.

• jameslon says:

  14 May14 May 13:30

  OK, here’s how I managed to get it to work on iOS.
  1. If you have already installed the app, remove it from your phone, and re-install from the App Store.
  2. Register your details (it should now work). Quit the app (swipe up), re-start, and then the Congratulations screen should re-appear with your name and card number showing.
  Hope it works for others.

• Geoggy says:

  14 May14 May 14:35

  Whilst this card is clearly good – after the bloody farce of the launch I think I will wait and see what the view is once people get their cards.

  After trying innumerable times yesterday I tweeted them and they asked me to DM them my email address. I did and then they said “thanks will check that now” then they disappeared for 12 hours, whilst clearly still helping people on Twitter.

  Add to that people trying today are getting accepted and I am half tempted to tell them where to stick it.

  I might be wrong and their CS might be tiptop but I can’t see it unless they invest heavily in service

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.