On my last long trip of 5 week to Europe and the USA I encountered a VISA problem I still cannot resolve.
Since I travel a lot, I make dozens of hotel, flight and other bookings annually on the internet using ccs. Usually it is a Citibank issued VISA since that gets me double the miles of my other ccs. In the last year or so it has been the policy of VISA to send a 6 digit PIN by sms to my mobile phone which I must type in at the end of the booking process in order to complete the purchase. When I am in Thailand there is clearly no problem. When I am overseas it is.
Like many posters here I believe, I generally do not use my Thai SIM card when overseas. I purchase one on arrival for use in whichever country I'm visiting. I'm just not prepared to pay hefty Thai roaming charges on long trips. Plus many of the people I meet up with overseas are not prepared to call a Thai number to reach me when I am just a few kms away.
i only discovered this some months ago when making a flight booking when overseas. Not having the Thai SIM with me I could not complete the process. With all the hassle of then phoning up the airline in question, I discovered that the phone booking price was higher than the internet price (or perhaps the lower priced ticket had by then sold out). I immediately called this bank's VISA security department in Hong Kong to check if they could verify it was me by sending an email or asking the normal questions about my identity or some other means. It was like talking to a robot. The answer was a flat "No". This is VISA and the bank's policy.
The other problem on my long summer trip was that I often use a hotel booking site that generally offers the best rates but does not immediately deduct the cost. That is left to the hotel which can claim its payment any time from that point on up to arrival. Since I had booked eight hotels in different countries several months earlier, my concern was that if these went through to VISA as internet bookings just days prior to arrival, in the absence of a PIN there might be a chance they'd be cancelled. So I had to contact each hotel and give them my American Express card info in case there was an issue with VISA. Amex also now require a PIN but will at least send an email in addition to an sms. On my return I wrote to the head of security at the bank. I got the usual waffle. This is a VISA regulation, not the bank's.
Does anyone have a solution to what remains for me quite a problem? There is talk that Amex will soon dispense with the email part. If so, then the only solution I can think of is to carry two phones. remember to switch off the roaming service on the Thai one prior to departure and then to switch it on each time I make an internet purchase. Since all my communications devices are Apples I certainly would prefer not to have the headache of switching to a dual SIM phone. Or is that in fact a better solution?
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Originally Posted by goji
