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My experiences with using the Travelex Supercard

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I was over in Amsterdam last week which gave me an opportunity to test out my new Supercard from Travelex.

As I outlined here, this is a revolutionary new Visa card which translates your foreign currency purchases into Sterling and then recharges them (in £) to another Visa or Mastercard.  You earn full reward points from the card where your transaction ends up and you save 3% on foreign exchange fees with each purchase.

Travelex is not currently taking new applications for Supercard.  The card is currently in a beta phase where a few thousand people are trying it out.

Supercard

The first thing to note is:

You can change the PIN of your Supercard at any UK ATM

Travelex does not tell you this but it works fine.

Whilst in Amsterdam I made a number of transactions:

A cash withdrawal in Euros

Machine-based transactions (ie train ticket vending machines)

Manual transactions (eg hotel, restaurants)

I had set up my Supercard so that all of the transactions were recharged to my IHG Rewards Club Premium Visa card, as I am currently working towards the free night voucher for spending £10,000.

The good news is that the Supercard worked fine every time.  It is thinner than a standard credit card, and your personal details are printed on it rather than embossed, but that was not a problem.

The even better news is that it does seem to work as promised.  The InterContinental cheekily tried to charge me €32 in £ without giving me the € option – the credit card machine showed £25-ish.  I insisted on paying in Euro and it eventually went through my Supercard at £23-ish.

The bad news is that the Supercard app has been very troublesome.  Every time I try to bring up a list of recent transactions it crashes.   I have never managed to bring up a transaction list successfully.  I am able to view my last transaction but not the full list.

Transactions are taking some time to reach my credit card statement – they process at the same speed as a normal card purchase.  The transactions were all done on Monday and Tuesday last week.  They started to hit my IHG credit card statement on Friday and, by Sunday evening, the last one had yet to arrive.

This is how they appear on my IHG card statement:

Tms Supercard NS Schiphol, Chester (NS is Dutch Railways, Chester is where Supercard is based)

Tms Supercard, Tvx Schiphol, Chester (cash withdrawal from a Travelex cashpoint)

What was most impressive is that the €120 ATM cash withdrawal has gone through my IHG Rewards Club credit card as a purchase.  This means I will earn points on it and will not pay any cash advance fees or interest.

So far, then, so good – but Travelex really needs to iron out the bugs in the app.  I would have had more confidence in the card initially if I had been able to see my transactions in real time.

The biggest test for Supercard will be in Germany next month where we will have a very large hotel bill to settle.  If that goes through OK, saving me over £100 in FX fees and probably getting me over the line for my IHG Rewards Club Premium Visa free night, I will be very happy.

PS.  In my initial article on Supercard I didn’t list the spending limits that are imposed.  These are the key figures you need to remember:

Maximum value of single ATM transaction – £250
Maximum daily ATM Cash withdrawal – £500
Maximum ATM Cash withdrawal per 4-day cycle – £1,000
Maximum daily Point of Sale Spend – £5,000
Number of Purchases per day – 15
Number of ATM Transactions per day – 3
Maximum card usage in one month – £20,000
Maximum card usage in one year – £20,000

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Category

General

Comments (163)

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

  • Jonathan says:
    17 Jun17 June 10:32

    Surely the ability to use an ATM against a linked credit card without any charges is a mistake that will get plugged? Otherwise this is a great feature, but I am sure the credit cards will be very displeased with this (if they are not already, losing the forex commission)

    • Rob says:
      17 Jun17 June 12:01

      Some credit cards will benefit – many will switch from Halifax Clarity, Post Office etc to Supercard which recharges to a rewards card. That rewards card would never have seen the business otherwise.

  • Wembleygal says:
    17 Jun17 June 17:26

    So far so good – I have used it twice for online spends in the States.

  • ADS says:
    18 Jun18 June 02:40

    was just checking my Equifax report … and saw that Travelex (Gb Group-tuxedo Moneyplus Ltd Nc) carried out five identity checks on me – all on 13th May.

  • Daniel says:
    19 Jun19 June 10:40

    It may already be noted above – but FYI if you’ve not added a card yet, credit cards are now blocked. It is only accepting debit cards (I’ve tried several across different financial institutions).

  • Mikeact says:
    19 Jun19 June 16:57

    Couple of points on my European tour.A retailer made an honest error and billed me twice for the same item, he thought I had entered a wrong pin and what with his very iffy wifi, both went through. I showed him my phone with the two identical transactions, very impressive, and he immediately did a refund for the duplicate purchase. But , refunds do not show in your transactions, as the help desk told me….they could see the successful refund, but not me. I guess I could call my cc, Tesco, or wait for my statement to check.
    Secondly, and they have asked me to email this error, most of the savings that you are shown per transaction have now disappeared, which is annoying as I was keeping a running check, the transactions are still shown on your phone in full detail, but the ‘saving’ bit is missing. Again, the help desk could see my savings but not me.
    Still very impressed for a beta test.

  • bob says:
    19 Jun19 June 17:20

    Not just Plats, reported BA Amex too

    • mikeact says:
      20 Jun20 June 13:56

      I do think that totally irrelevant OT’s to the subject matter in question should be banned, useful maybe, but wheret to post ?

      • Rob says:
        20 Jun20 June 14:06

        I may trial a forum … still in 2 minds ….

        • Alan says:
          20 Jun20 June 14:13

          Will be interesting to see what you decide but for my 2p – I still like the current setup, even with the OTs – it’s great being able to follow all the comments on each article, with a free for all forum it could end up like a second FT! 🙂

          • Mikeact says:
            20 Jun20 June 17:31

            That’s fine, if you have the time and interest to follow each and every comment regarding every topic every day, bearing in mind you could be following particular topics for a few weeks until Rob calls a halt. It is very easy therefore to miss any OT’s that are posted.

          • Alan says:
            21 Jun21 June 04:39

            Agreed, although with a forum wouldn’t you have the same issue with (likely) lot of threads being posted there too?

      • bob says:
        20 Jun20 June 17:57

        Sorry, meant to put it on Bits but happened to be on this thread & you can’t delete & repost in the right place.

        Have been doing my best to post OT bits on Bits not other threads, honest.

  • Nick says:
    20 Jun20 June 10:55

    This card/service is a complete mess. Having struggled to register in the first place some time ago, my card arrived this week. however, setting it up for use it near to impossible. The app is a complete mess – having tried maybe 20 times to activate my card it rejects every combination I type in. Even resetting my password fails, rejecting my account number and email.

    I called their help line and they cut me off. Now it just presents a message saying all the operators are busy and I should call back later.

    I might just shred this card as Travelex clearly have no idea how to provide a reasonable level of service

    • mikeact says:
      20 Jun20 June 14:01

      Totally disagree,perhaps I was lucky but I found everything straight forward.Try tweeting them with your issues.

  • Leo says:
    20 Jun20 June 14:53

    Received my card (finally) yesterday – had had all sorts of problems initially with the app. Phoned customer services yesterday – eventually got me up and running – had to delete the app and re-install. Linked card to my IHG c/card – bought some 100% bonus IHG points this afternoon and am told it has gone through, had the email etc…..it looks like it has worked, but I’ll keep an eye out for how it posts onto the credit card account etc.

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