Yeah, real blessing for travelling it seems - for last 2 years, every time we travel somewhere, we meet somebody (young, from Europe) who has some issues withdrawing money/paying with Revolut. Wasting hours running around town finding which ATM/branch would work with some obscure semi-bank account.

It has its benefits, but travelling around the world currently doesn't seem like one.

I travel quite a lot and I've had a few problems paying with the Revolut card, but not more than with my traditional bank credit cards (for example a few years ago, my card from a normal bank wouldn't work in Qatar, to this day I don't know why).

I have learned on my own skin that travelling with a single card is not a good idea. I always have two (plus some hard cash just in case). But Revolut has became my first choice to pay abroad because it charges no commission when paying with foreign currency (I suppose they make some money by tweaking exchange rates, but so do normal banks, and I have checked in practice that Revolut is much cheaper). So even if it's not perfect, I would say travelling around is and advantage.

By the way, what I don't understand about Revolut is why they never charged me the tips I paid when I was in New Orleans last summer... they had this weird tipping system at restaurants where you would first pay the raw prices, and then you would write the tip manually on a piece of paper and they were supposed to charge it later on, except they never did.

Completely standard in the US... I am surprised that's legal that they're not charging you for that (since it likely means they're not paying the restaurant that money)

IMHO it doesn't seem legit that they can initiate transaction for X amount, give you a receipt where you can write amount Y, and then charge you for X+Y sometime later.

I really don't want to deal with my bank if by some chance amount Y is not what I wanted.

From my (European) point-of-view this seems completely ridiculous, since here I see the actual amount before I have to swipe/insert the card into the device.

However, I completely agree with you that it's not fair to the restaurant/workers if they don't actually get the tip.

Yes, it's very strange to me too as another European (although I did want to pay the tips and not screw the workers, of course).

Not that I like tipping systems at all, I find them an unnecessary hassle for the customer and detrimental to workers' rights, but if you have to have it I found the system in Canada (at least in Vancouver) much saner: you could key the tip amount into the POS machine when you pay, or directly select a tip percentage and the machine would add the tip for you. Compared to that, having to actually calculate the amount by hand and write it with a pen in the restaurants in New Orleans, blindly trusting that they would eventually charge that amount, looked like... last century.

I have Monzo and Revolut and they do charge you later for tips last time I checked. But it would be great if they couldn't, it's a huge security fail in my opinion.

Checked Monzo again, they have this in american transactions:

> Restaurants in the USA

> Restaurants in the USA are a bit of a special case. The waiter runs your card for the meal's amount and then, after youtip, they cancel the first transaction and charge you again for the meal plus your generous tip.

> REAL TIME

> The problem is that, until the first transaction reverses (10 days later) we don't have a way to tell that the restaurant charged you once or twice.

> Legacy banks will block the initial transaction amount in your account and release it 10 days later, but only the amount + tip will appear in your statement :)

Where do you travel? The cards are on the Visa or Mastercard network so I'd expect the majority of ATMs to support Revolut.

south america, asia in these cases (bolivia, argentina, indonesia were the last ones)

Using Revolut and Monzo, I never had problems in South America and Asia (except for a few hickups with Revolut security options in Cancun). I've seen these kind of problems happening NUMEROUS times with plenty of different banks to me and my friends. It is just irresponsible to travel with a single bank card.

I've been traveling a LOT (from San Francisco to Taiwan) with my Monzo/Revolut and the only problems I had were in Cancun were Revolut's "location-based withdrawal" was detecting the charge to be too far from my phone. I had to disable it to make it work.

Monzo has an emergency web site where you can freeze/unfreeze your card or report stolen. Pretty useful feature if you happen to lose your phone.