Apparently, Washington Mutual will soon be changing their debit cards to Mastercard. I thought I read somewhere that Visa Debit cards are more widely accepted. Should I be concerned about this? Has anyone had problems getting cash out with MC debit cards? Thanks

My debit card is a MasterCard and it worked just fine in Rome. Beware high fees though - we were charged 10 euros for every transaction in Rome PLUS an additional fee by our bank. So, take out as much money as you feel confortable carrying to minimize trips to the ATM.

wliwl, if you think you were charged ANYTHING AT ALL by a European bank for using their ATM, you are wrong. Maybe you were lied to by your bank or someone else, but there are no banks in Europe that charge you for using their ATM. If you use some privately owned ATM at a convenience store or somewhere, there will be a charge, but there is no reason to do that as there are bank ATMs everywhere. If you used a bank ATM and you paid a $10 fee plus more, all those fees came from your own bank.

Missy, it seems that Mastercard and Visa must have a reciprocal agreement, as machines with either symbol seem to take both. By the way Plus and Cirrus are corresponding ATM name/symbols for MasterCard and Visa.

Perhaps you weren't pulling money from your checking account - but taking a cash advance on the MC. That's the only way I can see that you would be charged a fee by a bank in europe.

The other option is that you were using a commercial vs bank ATM. These ATMs - just like in the US (in stores, train stations etc) are simply profit centers and do charge a fee - so you should use ones attached to a bank instead. (But I've never heard of 10 euros - it's usually a dollar or two - like in the US).

Thanks Patrick,
You know, I'm still annoyed about those charges. I think I'm going to drag out my statement and call my bank. I should have done it earlier.

Yes, you should. I'm also curious if nytraveler had it right -- that perhaps you actually were getting a cash advance from your credit card rather than withdrawing funds from your checking account.

For our cash withdrawals during our recent trip to Italy, we used only bank ATM's using a Chase (Debit) Visa/MasterCard, drawing against our Chase checking account.

Upon returning home and seeing our Chase Statement, I was surprised to see a 3.5% charge tacked on in addition to the INT'L CIRRUS ATM fee of $3.

I questioned Chase about this and they said that it always levied this charge but in the past (I had checked my last year's records), it was buried into the exchange rate - there had been customer complaints about this practice - but recently they've made it a separate line item.

They say that 2% goes to the local bank (in this one case it was Banca Chianciano Terme in San Quirico) and 1.5% goes to Chase. Thus each €500/$623 withdrawal cost us about $25.

This was unexpected...

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not one single problem.