Just back from a two week trip and I found credit cards in Austria (and then Munich) to be surprisingly complicated and unpredictable. This after recent trips to Paris and London where everything has changed over to tap and pay and it couldn’t be any simpler.
Every waiter/waitress has a terminal in a holster, you pay at your table. The wrinkle seems to be once the terminal realizes that you’re using an American based credit card, yes when the language on the gadget changes over to English you realize that has occurred. Sometimes the tap works, and you’re on your way. Sometimes it balks, and then you put your card chip-first into the slot. After that, sometimes a paper receipt pops out, and sometimes you need to sign it and sometimes not. In one case I was dining outdoors and had to follow the waitress inside where the master cash register printed out a receipt I had to sign.
The other catch is, it will often ask if you want to pay in euros or dollars and show two amounts. For those who don’t know, this is a controversial “feature” of using credit cards abroad called DCC that almost everyone recommends you skip.
I also noticed that Amex was widely accepted in Vienna and then once I started heading west the acceptance rate dropped – starting on the Westbahn train to Salzburg where I was trying to use a vending machine. I finally broke down and asked a nearby passenger for help, he translated the message on the machine saying no Amex. In fact I noticed that most stores in Salzburg had decals on their terminals that only said MC and Visa. So as always, make sure you bring a variety of cards from a variety of banks.
No one wanted a PIN, even when I used my Andrews FCU card that I got specifically to use in Europe because it was PIN enabled. The only time I needed a PIN was buying train tickets from a machine in Munich when I used my Schwab international travel debit card (I just thought it would register as a Visa card).
And not wishing to cause an international incident but … every time I used a credit card to pay for a meal the waiter would ask if I wanted to add a tip. It would appear on my receipt either labelled tip (so much for not being able to process that) or as a bar tab.