prepaid cards?

[Ruby's Dad]

in the past we have found it easier and cheaper to simply use our debit cards in the u.s. however in recent times the charges for using your card abroad have increased. Thomas cook offer a prepaid card and there are other cards we have come acrossffering the same service. thomas cooks and most of the other cards state they can be used wherever mastercard is accepted, so my question is this, is mastercard widely accepted in florida or is it mostly visa as it seems to be in the uk and does anyone else have experience of using precards in florida?

 

[stba2006]

We used a pre-paid card in 2008 (thin it was post office) and we didn't really have any problems using it.

I don't recall that anywhere refused the card, in fact some places seemed a little bit slack about even checking the signatures etc.

Having said that we did also take money so didn't use the card everywhere.

The one thing that i would make sure to look at before chosing are the fees. When we got back and worked through everything it had cost us a fortune in fees as we hadn't used it as carefully as we thought. (eg when making withdrawals we should hvae maybe taken more money out and less withdrawals). It soon mounted up.

 

[VailaTigger]

We used a FairFX card last year with no problems. It was accepted everywhere we went in WDW.

You do get charged for taking money out of ATMs however, so take out the max amount each time, then you don't get charged too often.

 

[littlelaura]

you should have no problems using mastercard in the US. the prepaid card operators wouldn't sell them otherwise. if you are going to get one, can i recommend fairfx. we have used both thomascook and fairfx prepaid cards.
the main benefit from the fairfx card, is that there is no penalty for inactivity. if the card expires they will just transfer any funds to a new card for you. when we used thomascook they started debiting an amount (i think about £3) every month after it had been inactive for 15months and there was also a fee to request the balance (in £) back. because of this we 'lost' about £8 which was left on the card.

 

[orangetiggs]

ive used fairfx with no problems in us and other countries

We will be taking ours back in oct to use as well and they always offer a good rate

 

[penlanspice]

We've used our fairfx card for a number of years and now all our family have them too, they give the best exchange rate for a pre paid card that I've seen, you can top it up on line and I think the minimum is £20.

There is usually a fee of £9.95 but you can get it free through a matalan link.