{"id":85,"date":"2010-03-07T18:12:46","date_gmt":"2010-03-07T16:12:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bergs.biz\/blog\/?p=85"},"modified":"2010-03-07T18:12:46","modified_gmt":"2010-03-07T16:12:46","slug":"mastercard-discriminates-european-cardholders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bergs.biz\/blog\/2010\/03\/07\/mastercard-discriminates-european-cardholders\/","title":{"rendered":"MasterCard discriminates European cardholders"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A couple of days ago, I booked a journey to Kuala Lumpur and Bali for my wife and me. When it came to paying the travel agent advised me that there would be a surcharge of 0.3% imposed <em>by the tour operator<\/em> when you pay with credit card &#8212; independent of which brand your credit card is.<\/p>\n<p>I was pretty outraged because of the surcharge, because until then I was pretty sure that this kind of charges were expressly forbidden by card acquirers (an &#8220;acquirer&#8221; is the party which acquires the transacations of the merchant).<\/p>\n<p>Therefore I visited MasterCard&#8217;s website in order to investigate their acceptance procedures. I found something very interesting in the MasterCard rules dated 2009-11-06.<\/p>\n<p>In article 5.9.2. it says about &#8220;Charges to cardholders:&#8221;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>A Merchant must not directly or indirectly require any Cardholder to pay a surcharge or any part of any Merchant discount or any contemporaneous finance charge in connection with a Transaction.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Duh!<\/p>\n<p>When I continued to read I found a section &#8220;10 Europe Region Rules&#8221; where it said the following in &#8220;10A.3 Charges to Cardholders:&#8221;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Rule 5.9.2 does not apply in the European Economic Area.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>So, why is this? Why does MasterCard reserve the right to discriminate their European cardholders compared to their US cardholders? &#8220;What have we done to deserve this?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>To Meier&#8217;s Weltreisen, the tour operator: Instead of adding surcharges to customers who pay using a credit card (and that will be the absolute majority of all customers), you should recalculate your prices and refrain from playing such dirty tricks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A couple of days ago, I booked a journey to Kuala Lumpur and Bali for my wife and me. When it came to paying the travel agent advised me that there would be a surcharge of 0.3% imposed by the tour operator when you pay with credit card &#8212; independent of which brand your credit [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[279],"class_list":["post-85","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-vacation","tag-vacation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bergs.biz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bergs.biz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bergs.biz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bergs.biz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bergs.biz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bergs.biz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bergs.biz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bergs.biz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bergs.biz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}