Quit worrying about chip & pin

this echos my experiences in spain, paris, and switzerland.

In general terms, I found the further south you go in Europe the less likely restaurants or cafes are to accept credit cards. We used cards much of the time in France, the UK, Belgium, Amsterdam, Switzerland, and Austria, however most places in Italy or Spain wanted cash, so I always made sure I had cash before going to eat. I heard more than once in Italy and Spain, "our machine is not working," but I was pretty sure they simply didn't want me to pay by credit card (this happens in the U.S. too, as merchants lose as much as 2% to the credit card companies).

Places in France other than the train station ticket dispensers where US cards don't work are autoroute toll booths and unattended gas pumps. Otherwise, we've never had a problem with our credit or debit cards.

Let me throw in one caveat... many businesses in Germany do not accept American credit cards. But these are mostly businesses that tourists would never visit, like hardware stores, building suppliers, and even some international chains, like Ikea and MediaMarkt. But then again, who travels to Europe to buy an unassembled Poång? As the other Tom mentioned, for the average tourist visiting Europe from North America, not having a chip and PIN card will at most cause a very minor inconvenience.

I was looking through some travel "stuff" and saw some point to point train tickets, eg., Berlin-Magdeburg, r/t, I had bought from the DB ticket machine in 2009. I used the "good old American magnetic-stripe" Visa and Mastercard and it went through. Your proof is on the ticket itself with the last 4 digits of the credit card indicated. So, buying DB tickets from the machine with US credit cards works. Hopefully this hasn't changed in Germany.

I've tried that once in the past two months, at the Heidelberg Hauptbahnhof. And the machine would not accept my US credit card. Couldn't comment on the rest of Germany, though.

I agree with Tom in Germany. We needed to get a bus ticket to get from the Marseilles Airport to Avignon and the machine would not take our credit card. There wasn't a ticket window to purchase a ticket. If it hadn't been for a kind Frenchman who used his credit card to purchase our tickets and let us pay him cash I'm not sure what we would have done. Otherwise, we didn't have a problem.

I'm here to say that not being able to use an automated ticket dispenser when the line at the ticket window is 45 minutes long IS a HUGE inconvenience.

I don't know if this is typical, but last week at the very busy Gare de Lyon train station in Paris, the line was longer at the automated ticket machines than at the ticket windows.

Just got back from London, Paris, roadtrip to Normandy/Brittany, Bruges, Brussels. I was able to use my Visa or American Express in most places. On toll roads sometimes they worked and sometimes they didn't either at automated or with a person. Last night in Bruges, the restaurant's new credit card machine would not accept it and my husband had to run to the ATM.