Why was hotel payment declined? #FirstDisappointingExperience

Hi, i’ve been using Revolut all week in Austria and everything has been working just great. This morning, when paying the hotel bill, I had my first disappointing experience. The transaction of 3200 Eur was declined despite the Eur account having a balance of 3500 Eur. I checked the app again and there is no security setting or spending limit which would have caused this. There was also no notification of any declined transaction either. Suspecting a limit of some sort, I tried again for 1500 Eur and again declined. Another of 1000 Eur - also declined. I then tried to transfer Eur from within the app to my wife’s account, to try her card but the transfer failed within the app with an uninformative message saying “please try again later”. I then tried to see if my card was blocked and neeed unfreezing, it didn’t look blocked but clicking on Freeze gave same error as the transfer request. As a taxi was coming shortly I ended up having to pay the hotel bill on normal uk credit card.

The upshot is that i’ve now incurred a large cost with a rubbish exchange rate and a 3% cost and now have a large but useless Eur Revolut balance as I won’t be in Europe again this year. So what’s the best thing to do here?

Longer term, i’ve lost a lot of confidence in Revolut for anything other than small daily tranactions. There seems a real lack of transparancy as to what happened here to cause the hotel bill transaction to fail. There were funds present. I don’t think the amount is above any daily transaction limit. I don’t think there were any weekly, monthly limits breached. No spending limits set. Etc. As this will no doubt be excused by the easy get out clause of security checks, I doubt i’ll ever find out why. But if it was security based, why do I have no notifications about it.

Any tips on how to restore confidence or handle end of holiday hotel bill scenarios in future (as these are typically the largest).

Gatherer

If your Revolut card was issued by Wirecard (printed at the back), you have a daily limit of €5,000.

That’s the only limit that I can think of that would apply to you, if you spent another €1800 that day?

Maybe @anon33247966 can look into it, or have better answers :sweat_smile:

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Hi, no other transactions that day as it was around 0850 Europe time. Nothing greater than 50Eur in the previous 24 hours either.

I started a support chat this morning about this particular issue, (it’s still ongoing) during which it said that there were technical issues this morning affecting some app functionalities. Are these issues reported anywhere (as I haven’t seen any reports of this outside of that chat) and could that have contributed to the payment declines?

I suspect that the terminal used by the hotel does not have any internet connectivity and because of that your card could not be validated to have the required funds on it. More information about why can be found in the FAQ that explains why some toll boths dosen’t work.

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The hotel terminal is fully connected. It’s not an isolated middle of nowhere type of thing handling trivial transactions, like a toll booth.

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The current explanation from the support query is basically that sometimes things don’t work for technical or other reasons and that this is stated in the terms and conditions.

Hardly reassuring if you want to pay for larger transactions and create substantial up front credit to do so.

Hi there.

There was a brief technical issue, however it is now resolved. If you still need help don’t hesitate to reach out to our in-app support team. Apologies for the inconvenience caused😣

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Are these technical issues published on the website anywhere e.g. service announcements and include details like start time and end time and what it affected? Being open and transparent about this would help people greatly.

For instance, if i’d known that there was an issue this morning that would have helped things greatly and I may have been able to wait until it was resolved. Without knowing any reason as to why it wasn’t working, I just had to use my normal credit card.

Also, if i’d been more aware about how often issues occur, I could have tried to pay parts of the bill in advance to reduce the impact of one single payment failing

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So the upshot is that my attempts to pay failed due to technical issues on the Revolut side. I’ve had to pay using the fallback of normal reliable credit card and am out of pocket GBP 3000+ in unused Eur credit.

100% Revolut fault due to the issue but nothing that they will do about it as stated in terms and conditions.

The lesson here is that things are clearly not reliable yet and if you plan on using Revolut for larger transactions you are taking on some considerable personal risk.

Has anyone else experienced similar issues and worked out how best to deal with them?

Your experience was apparently 4 years ago, but I am having a similar, ongoing problem with unexplained failed payments.

I am a new Revolut customer since December 2021. I live in the US but will be traveling to England and Scotland regularly, so during my last trip someone recommended getting a Revolut card with both British pound and US dollar balances. During the same trip I also got a second SIM card with a UK number for my iPhone.

The Revolut card worked perfectly in the UK for a few small bus and restaurant transactions. And when I got back to the US it worked properly for a few small retail transactions.

Unfortunately, whenever I try to use my Revolut card to pay my monthly EE mobile phone bill, I get a message saying the “payment was declined” with no further information.

I have now tried for the 3rd month with no luck - each time I resort to using one of my other US-issued credit or debit cards. These other cards work perfectly each time. My Revolut card uses the same address and phone number used by my other cards. EE clearly has no problem with either credit or debit cards, or the fact that I have a US address. They simply do not seem to accept my Revolut card.

I have tried using both the “virtual” Revolut card, and the physical card. Neither one works.

When I contact EE, they say the payment failed and that I should contact my bank/credit card issuer.

When I contact Revolut “help chat” they are not helpful at all. They say to contact EE because there is nothing wrong with my card.

If anyone sees this and has any suggestions I would love to get some help. As things stand now, it’s obvious that the Revolut card itself is not really trustworthy, and the online help is not helpful when help is really needed.

I shall be using my card in India soon but I will ensure I have a back up after reading this

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