Is there a credit card that won't get incorrectly tagged for fraud with international travel

Question

I travel quite a bit. I had a Chase card. About once a month they'd mark it for fraud because of my travel. Not once was it actually fraud. All charges were legit. On top of that I have flawless credit. I always pay the bill.

This was massively frustrating and inconvenient. I'm at a store in some country, talk to a sales person, spend an hour checking out something, finally decide on which model of whatever I want to purchase, then have my card denied. I'm in a foreign country, have a local data-only sim. I have to wait until I go back the hotel to call the credit card company then go back to the store the next day. MASSIVELY INCONVENIENT!

Other examples, I'm trying to book a hotel. I'm on some hotel site like booking.com or hotels.com. I find a hotel, it claims "only one room left". Type in my info, credit card company decides it's fraud. Charge denied. Call them up, 15-20 mins later I can try again but rooms are gone.

Same with airline tickets. Go through the 20 minute process of filling out the 5 or 6 pages of stuff on an airline site only to have the charge denied at the last moment. Again have to call the credit card company, 15-20 minutes on the phone with them, then back to having to fill out the 20 minutes of forms on the air ticket site.

I switched to a Capital One card. For 2 years I travelled all over Europe and Asia with no questions. Then, for no explicable reason I got the first invalid fraud charge denial in October. Then again in November. Another in December and yesterday in January.

What's makes it even more frustrating is they have records of me being in all these countries. They can see I am and have been travelling all over for the last 27 months. And yet I'm getting these frustrating fraud denials that are massively inconvenient and time consuming.

I find it extremely hard to believe that some executives that travel even more than me would put up with such inconveniences.

Is there a credit card out there that doesn't have these issues? That's specifically designed for extensive travellers?

Answer 1

In the US, most people don't ever travel outside of the country. A third of Americans don't even have a passport. Almost a quarter of Americans had never actually left their State! (source) So a credit card being charged all around the world - is an exception, not a rule. And exceptions raise flags.

In the US, banks ask (read: require) you to tell ahead your travel plans. You need to actively call/email them with your itinerary. Each time you travel. Ahead of time. Otherwise, what you describe will keep happening.

Also, consider a situation that while you use your card abroad, it may have been copied. While your legitimate charges got denied, also some illegitimate were. Don't know if that's the case here, but American credit cards are notorious for not being secure (they only started issuing chip cards last year, and even those are without a PIN).

So no, there are no US cards that would not end up doing this to you. Even the so-called "travel" or "airline" cards do that. Because that's how they're covering their a$$ets, and they don't really care about your convenience. You're not their target client, they don't earn money from you. They earn money from a person who is piling up debt and never actually goes anywhere. You know, the average American, you must have seen those. And for those clients - they will never ever have an out of country charge that would not be fraudulent.

As to executives... Those have corporate/business cards. Those are better in this regard, but to get a proper corporate card you need to be... in a proper corporate world.

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More recent update since someone pinged this answer: As of now (2022) some banks no longer require providing travel notices. For example, neither Chase, nor Capital One require them anymore. Some others still do (Citi for example). Some issuers also start handling fraud cases on-line via an interactive SMS or email where you can confirm that you have indeed made the transaction. It would then supposedly go through on retry. That said, I still occasionally have issues (in my most recent trip I had both Chase and Citi cards randomly acting up).

Answer 2

Virtually any non-US card.

I've travelled with Canadian and UK cards and had very few problems. I get fraud alerts occasionally, but I get them occasionally when I'm sitting behind my desk at home buying stuff online.

It may be tricky to get one of those cards, but it's certainly a solution.