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Hi, hoping someone can help me out. I've just tried to buy 4 tickets on the ALSA bus from Madrid to Porto, leaving 23/12/09 at 11pm. Got through the purchase process and when I went to finalise payment got the message that "bank has refused this operation". I have previously informed the bank that our family would be travelling to Spain and Portugal December 09/January 2010 and that there maybe transactions on our visa card in the forthcoming months. Some accommodation transactions have already gone through without a hitch.
Wondering if anyone else had this problem even though they'd advised their bank of travel plans.
Purchasing Bus Tickets Madrid - Porto on ALSA bus
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Not the exact scenario, but CCs sometimes will have the fraud alert when you do multiple foreign transactions within a short period of time. Since you only alerted your CC about your trip late this year, it doesn't apply to transactions happening now - at least I dont think the CCs fraud dept is that sophisticated.
I actually never tell my CC companies of my travel dates, and all my foreign transactions always get approved, except for one. I think I was buying 3 train tickets on Renfe website back to back to back, and finally the 3rd transaction was refused by my CC company. I ended up using a different CC to buy the last ticket; and 5 minutes later, my first CC company called me to verify it was me making all these purchases.
In the last 3-4 years everytime I have tried to purchase ALSA tickets I have had the same experience as you. No CC would work. I reached the conclusion that their payment processing system for whatever reason does not accept US ccs . What I ended doing was calling their sales number and purchasing the tickets over the phone . Then they gave me a confirmation code that I used to retrieve the tickets the day of travel.
yk and cruiseluv - thanks very much for your replies.
We'll probably call the bank again and give it one more try with the credit card. If that doesn't work then they don't like Australian CC's either!
The next step will be a phone call. I appreciate your help.
I do want to say that I was successful in buying a bus ticket on Alsa in 2008. I used my US AMEX.