It works in the US in some ATMs; I was in Orlando and managed to find 1 ATM, at the airport, that worked, all the rest, although it said Maestro, did not work. And we tried in over 50 machines as credit cards are uncommon in europe (and NL banks do not do conventional debit cards), we did not bring other cards.

But the converse is not true; when europeans go to Germany they can't pay with cards that are normally accepted elsewhere. That is a major nuisance.

Really? When you can pay with a card, you can pay by either EC (girocard; German thing, or maestro by mastercard, 500-600 million such cards in circulation worldwide) or a regular credit/debit card (Visa, Mastercard, etc) almost always, and often stuff like Cirrus/VisaPlus is accepted too. That's a wide variety of options?

What other major payment systems are missing?

Look, I'm speaking from personal experience only, but due to work needs I travel almost every week to Frankfurt (purportedly the financial capital of Europe) with an amex, a visa and a mastercard; and each time I pick a taxi or I go to a restaurant there is about a 50% chance they do not take anything but EC Karte, or Cash only. It is so annoying that at work we have a running Splitwise group of about 25 people because always someone does not bring enough cash on them, only some spare change from last day plus all the usual cards. This is something that I have not suffered in UK, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Belgium, Louxembourg, France, Italy or Sweden. So I think German is an outlier here, and in a bad way. It is not the worst problem in the world; I just said it is annoying.

That's not surprising. Transaction costs for credit card payments in Germany are higher (2 to 4 percent) than for electronic cash payments (0.3 to 0.95 percent). It's simply not feasible for many sellers to offer credit card payments, especially as everyone in Germany has an electronic cash card anyway.

I wasn't trying to say you're wrong, just genuinely curious as I never experienced that myself. Then again I'm German and would never pay a German cab with anything but cash :p

But yeah, you need cash in Germany!

> This is something that I have not suffered in UK, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Belgium, Louxembourg, France, Italy or Sweden.

With Euro cash you can pay in most of these countries (in my experience in cases of emergency it even should be possible to pay with Euro cash in UK, Switzerland and Sweden).

You might use an app like taxi.eu to call a taxi, which allows to add constraints like "credit cards accepted".

I've been in Germany recently (with a card that is normally accepted elsewhere) and everything worked just fine. When was the last time you were there?

I live in Berlin, I would say the majority places will refuse to accept anything other than EC card

Two weeks ago. I'm there almost all weeks. It is still a nuisance (although I'll admit it is much better than in 2011, as commerces start using payment processor startups such as sumup instead of traditional german banking)

>But the converse is not true; when europeans go to Germany they can't pay with cards that are normally accepted elsewhere. That is a major nuisance.

Are you talking about niche cards like Amex?

My Visa was widely accepted in Germany, except at places that don't take cards at all. (Kebab stand, bar, etc)

No, I'm speaking precisely about places that only take cash or ecash (EC, maestro) but reject major credit card networks (amex visa Mastercard). They are not only kebab stands.

The issue has significantly higher complexity than either of you have portrayed here. Check here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maestro_(debit_card)#Europe