I can only speak for my own US magnetic strip cards, both credit and debit, which were used many times in Paris last month without incident. The only place our card did not work was at a self-service checkout in a Carrefour market.

I just saw another post here today or yesterday about chip and pin cards.

Have you checked with your bank to make sure *they* didn't decline it? It's possibly it showed up as suspected fraudulent activity and they chose to decline it, and until you call them and clear the charges your card will continue to have trouble? If that's not it... then I have no answer for you. Here in the US none of my VISA cards have pin and chip and most of the banks have been slow to provide them. I'm going to be doing a similar SNCF purchase in about a month so I'll look forward to hearing if there's some new wrinkle to ordering these tickets. Seems like there is plenty of discussion around this exact topic at least once or twice a year.

It's not the chip-and-pin, since there's no way (that I know of) for a merchant to scan a chip over the Net. One of my Canadian banks did hold my purchase of a faraway airline ticket to check that it was legit. They phoned; I said okay. So contact you cards' security numbers to give them notice in advance.

One of the declined cards was a BofA business account, which has permanent clearance to accept transactions from Europe as we do business there. The other was a Capital One with a travel notification in effect.

I called BofA and they said there was no record of attempted transactions. So it may be that some European financial institutions are wary of some U.S. cards.

Skatterfly, I hope you have better luck. The alternative of buying from Rail Europe would have cost 60 percent more.

I've had my BofA Visa declined (after I called to advise them the charge would be coming through). My American Express went through without a problem.

I've never had any card declined by European vendors because it was American, the only reasons where that my card itself had blocked the purchase, which I found out after calling them. Yes, one was a Capitol One which also supposedly had a travel notification in effect. They are sometimes incompetent in inputting that information (surprise). But I can verify that SNCF doesn't decline Capitol One credit cards as a matter of principle because after they did once, I called up Cap One (who admitted they had blocked it even though I had notified them), who then changed my account to accept it, and the next day it went through.

Sometimes I've had to have my Visa card "Verified by Visa." But I've bought SNCF tickets over the Internet, no problem. Not in the last year or so, though.

<< are European vendors or banks starting to decline our antiquated cards?>>

Our cards are perfectly fine. The chip-and-pin system was designed of necessity due to rampant credit card theft IN EUROPE that occurred at the spot of the transaction.

besides, the whole chip and pin thing isn't relevant for online purchases, anyway, is it. Once I got Cap One to do what they were supposed to do, I didn't have any trouble with it on SNCF (or other sites), and never had to do that verified by visa thing, either. Of course, it wasn't a Visa, but whatever the equivalent is for MC.

I think the real issue is that American banks are the ones who've gotten real picky in recent years and are automatically blocking a lot of purchases that used to immediately go through. Amex did the same thing to me, they just automatically blocked a foreign purchase even though it wasn't from an unusual country or fishy website. I could see blocking things automatically from unusual countries known for fraud or something (like Russia, probably, I get a lot of spam from them, or Nigeria, etc.), but from the UK and France? There really isn't anything more unusual about an online purchase from there than from some other part of the US as far as I'm concerned. But those CC companies don't see it that way.