this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2026
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Here in Czechia you can pay for online transactions with instant direct bank transfer, so cards are not really needed. This is often used for direct transfers between individuals where one generates a QR code on his phone and the other scans it.
it was very confusing when I was given a qr code as an option to pay on a restaurant in Czechia 😂
That's because Europe has SEPA, which are used in the EU.
Europeans mind can't comprehend the issues of american banks.
They are so bad, it doesn't make any sense.
SEPA pertains only to EUR, Czechia uses CZK
No.
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/retail/sepa/html/index.en.html
SEPA not only includes non-Euro countries, it also includes non-EU countries.
EUR is a symbol for Euro currency. I could have made that clear.
That changes nothing.
How are you going to use it to transfer CZK?
Have you never used it?
Or cheched out the link?
Wtf
You can use SEPA transfer only when the transfer is in Euro (EUR) - the currency.
CZK is Czech Crown, official currency of Czech Republic,. It is not Euro.
What are you talking about?
It's been many years since I've had a CZK account, but I had no issues making payments to EUR countries?
So I have no idea what are you talking about.
SEPA transfers are only in Euro (the currency). transfers from one CZK account to another require other transfer type. E. g. for PLN there are Elixir and Swift, but not SEPA
Still need an American credit card to rent a car tho
No you don't? What are you talking about?
Car rentals almost exclusively accept payment by credit card, unless you have a corporate account that is billed periodically.
I'm sure you can find an exception but please let's not fly off to nitpick land.
My parents are not from the USA and don't have USA bank accounts or credit cards and have had no problems renting a car in Europe or anywhere else they went. I really don't get what you mean. I don't see why you specifically need an American card and not just a credit card from any modern country.
Eu banks typically use a MasterCard or Visa partnership for their credit cards. The EU bank might issue the credit card to their customer, but the actual payment processor is an american company. If MasterCard/visa starts blocking certain payments, then there's nothing that the EU bank can do about it.
You can know which payment processor your bank's credit cards uses by the presence of a small logo on the front of the card. 2 overlapping red and orange circles = mastercard network.
As for car rental companies, Hertz has some wonderfully twisted logic on their Belgian site where they say that they accept debet payments from any eu bank card, as long as the card has the visa or Mastercard logo. In other words, they only accept Mastercard or Visa payments, not eu debet payments.
I mean if you don't understand things you should ask, not assume others are in the wrong. Yeah it would be pretty stupid to be forced to have US accounts to rent cars in Europe, luckily we're not THAT stupid.
VISA and MasterCard are practically a monopoly on credit card circuits, your parents' cards may be issued by a local bank but there's a 95% chance they've got one of these two companies' logo printed on them, and out of every payment they make, these AMERICAN companies get 2% (blah blah cashback, blah blah terms and conditions), because they are made on their circuits!
You may also have debit cards that DON'T have those logos, but debit cards can't be used for car rentals.
If you don't believe this is an issue, here, read about how Francesca Albanese, despite being an Italian citizen living in Europe, can't own credit cards or open bank accounts, a punishment imposed on her by the US for reporting the Gaza genocide for the UN.
Woah, now we have a right wing trucker and a left wing activist as examples of why cashless == fascist, it will make things easier to explain that position to people of different world views
I did ask. Specifically I asked what you were talking about. All you really had to say was Visa and MasterCard are USA companies that handle card transactions. If you had clarified that initially you wouldn't be getting downvoted to hell.
ugh, the children got here too
You also shouldn't assume that, maybe if you think others don't understand something, it's actually because you're wrong
If you have an account in any European bank, you can pay by bank transfer or SEPA in basically any European business, and often it's their favourite way to do it because there is no commission. I don't know country by country, but in Germany the standard for payment system is Girocard which is German payment processing, and the cards usually come equipped with both it and some American standard like visa and mastercard, but a lot of people opt out, if they don't care about payment outside of Europe.
Any car rental worth it's salt in Europe will accept some form of SEPA, but also, renting a car is not an essential part of people's lives here, so it's not even something people care about that much
It may not be part of your life, but I've done it hundreds of time as a travelling tech (plus a few as a tourist), and I've had times when airports with hundreds/thousands of rental cars had trouble satisfying demand, so it seems there are others with the same need.
And no, they don't accept SEPA, although terms vary by country, and if they do they require a safety deposit that can go from a few hundred euros to the thousands, not exactly practical.
How is a deposit not practical? Unless they require it in cash that has to then at the end be picked up at the pickup point (which would be crazy)? A rental company is taking a huge risk by renting cars to any random person with a driving license. It's the same reason they don't typically rent to people below 25 (or without a higher deposit).
It's really only unpractical if you don't have enough money on your account to afford the deposit, but then why are you renting cars? Otherwise you just pay a bit more the first time and then get that money deposited back on your account when you return the car. There's basically no difference in the end other than a bigger number the first time, and if you wreck the car or something, you will lose the deposit through your credit card too.
You need to have the money and manage it going back and forth, a credit card's CREDIT requires 0 management.
Yeah, that's why they like credit cards, they can guarantee a safety deposit HIGHER than your monthly withdrawal limit.
Let's say I'm poor, my car breaks down, I need to go to work otherwise I'll lose it, not everywhere has public transport options, I guess if I don't have an extra 1k€ on my account to pay for the deposit, I can get fucked, right? Shouldn't have been poor.
Shit americans say, I swear.
My man, if you rely on a car for work but your company doesn't provide you transportation, you're being exploited. If you live in the middle of the forest so there is no public transport around because squirrels keep chewing tram rails or whatever, but whatever your employer is paying you isn't covering your anti-squirrel measures, then again, you're being exploited. Contact your union rep, quit your job, find something normal. If you can't find anything, apply for one of a many government programs that will pay you stipend to learn skills that will allow you to start working for something other than whatever shady shit you did before.
But we're glaring over the most fun part of this all, the fact that I don't think there are places in Europe where you can rent a car from a renter that requires you to pay only with MasterVisa, but there is no public transportation around.
Add to this the fact that you talk about credit card as if it's normal to have one in Europe, and I am beginning to suspect that you don't actually know what you're talking about
Do you see the TLD on my instance?
look I like arguing just as much as the next person - no wait I don't! I don't even know why I'm arguing about this about people who don't want to listen, so whatever man, keep living in your fantasy land you're lucky enough to live in, I hope you never have to come out here with the dirties.
How are you getting a credit card in that last situation? You need a steady income and good credit that is able to pay the full credit at the end of the month to even apply for one. Which your hypothetical doesnt have....
And as the other person said, it's pretty ridiculous to go rent a car if you're in that situation because of how cheap and good public transportation is.
There's nothing you need to 'manage' about getting money back aside from checking your bank statement to make sure it went well. You would have to check that on your credit card statements too because deposit theft can happen just the same there too. But deposit theft is crazy uncommon to begin with.
And deposits are typically not 1k around here but like maybe 100-200 bucks at best, and on the lower end for your poor smuck example too.
Being traveling tech is absolutely not usual occupancy, so it doesn't change what I said. But if you work in Europe and traveling around, and moving around instruments is part of your job, you should have a company card anyway for it, so again, it doesn't really matter for the rest of Europeans.
What I'm trying to convey, that even though you will have some incompetence without American run banking systems, unless you're in a very specific operation, like needing to rent a car at an airport for example, you wouldn't be severely inconvenient.
I'm saying it as a refugee from a country that (for justifiable reasons) is getting some negativity around, and being born there I'm deemed not actually a good person in advance, and it took me a lot of time to convince various governments that I'm not a dangerous exemplar of my race. The time I spent without access to international banking systems like Visa weren't debilitating, even though inconvenient at times.
Being a travelling tech is fairly common, but even more common is being a sales rep or any other office worker that requires travelling. Who do you think takes the thousands of flights that go everyday between european airports, all tourists?
Not having access to those circuits IS a handicap, also because once you're outside the EU, they're your only option. But hey, if you people want to cover your ears and avoid listening, I will not waste any more time.
Being a traveling whatever and having to pay out of pocket for your transportation not only isn't common, a lot of the time it's illegal. And if your company setup that you pay first and get reimbursements later, you just ask your boss to issue you a company card since yours was taken away for trying to whistleblow, it's entirely not a big deal.
You're comming up with more and more contrived scenarios that are based on more and more improbable sets of circumstances that only work if you saw Europe on TV and imagined that it's like America but people talk in funny way.
who said I did?
Idk, I relied my experience, but whatever, you're right, I don't know exactly what you're trying to prove, all I'm saying is that renting a car without a VISA/MasterCard is difficult, but whatever, you guys seem to have taken it as a matter of honour to prove me wrong, when actually recognising issues we have in the EU due to our dependency on the US seems way more productive to me, but yeah I'm tired of arguing with... you.
I've literally rented cars in Greece using cash.
They do require some form of identification for obvious reasons, but that is about it.
None of the rental places required credit cards.
I think you are making too sweeping of a statement here. Maybe this is the case for car rentals you encounter / have access to but the response should show that's not the case everywhere in the EU. I rented a car without a credit card over 5 years ago where I'm from. You do pay a deposit that I suppose a credit card would normally insure for, but the option exists. Either way, if a car rental requires a credit card, I would not even consider renting with them. That's ridiculous.
Look, if you go to mom and pop's car rental, sure, they can accept hens as payment if they like. If you use car rentals the most common way, as a supplement for airport travel, you rent one in your city, you use it to go to the airport, return it, fly to your destination, rent another car at the airport, do your things, go back, repeat. At those locations you'll only have the big names, AVIS, Hertz, Europcar... Those are mostly credit-card or corporate account exclusive. And corporate accounts are expensive, at my former company we had a bunch of people travelling constantly and it still wasn't economically advantageous, apparently.
Also, you are just wrong about the big names you mentioned:
Europcar
AVIS
Hertz
Yeah, you just confirmed what I said:
Europcar: vague statement about countries, again WITH deposit.
AVIS: in the link it says mini car or van with debit AND deposit, otherwise credit.
Hertz: super vague, still asks for a deposit.
Look I'm tired of arguing, it seems that you've got that Reddit issue where you think you know more about something than those who regularly deal with that, so I'll tell you you're right, please go away.
Holy shit dude, you have a problem with accepting reality, not me 😂 The question was debit vs credit card, not deposit vs no deposit. I've never once said you need no deposit, you just made that up so you could say I'm wrong. And I also rent cars... your experience is no more valid than mine.
You're in a thread
You never said your statement was just about airport car rentals. Over here that is very likely not the most common usage of rentals (and certainly if you exclude business travel and holidays), since airports are far between, but car rentals are all over the place, far away from those airports. You rent cars over here if you dont own a car and need transportation. Or if you have to move a large amount of items you rent a van.
Besides, you can simply take the bus or train from any airport to a real car rental which should be close by in any major city. Of course if you go do it in a business hub you will find scams for the average person. Does that sacrifice a little bit of convenience, sure. But if you buy all your water from street vendors at a tourist attraction we dont claim water is expensive.
I can see you are simply from a very different world, that of business travel, which is why your perspective is so different.
EDIT: And no, I didn't use a mom and pop shop, I used the biggest car renter in my country (Netherlands) with over 130 locations.
in Poland we have something similar! we have BLIK and it generates a code for you that the other person taps into their terminal/you tap into an online purchase window, then it tells you to confirm again in the app and there you go, paid
there's also BLIK phone transfers, you just need the other person's phone number and (provided they have their bank linked to their phone number ofc) you can send money to their account that way
i haven't paid attention to it recently but when this was being introduced they also added a cheeky "this transaction only took you 30s ;)" at the end lol
We can also buy paysafecards in convenience stores, and these are actually anonymous, unlike Blik.
Also if for some reason you really have to use cash, PaysafeCards are still an option.
Just grab one from a nearest vendor and the code on the reciept is tied to a balance starting with the amount on the card.