Prepay Mastercard flaw

Just come across another major drawback with this awful scheme. There's a flight to Frankfurt Hahn I want to book, so dutifully I went to the post office, withdrew £30 and loaded it onto the card at 1630. When I got home the new money was not available. Not too worried at this point I left it until now ( 2345) . Money still not available to spend. The chances are the flights I want will have gone up by the time the money is available. When I used Electron in the same way the second the money was transferred into my Halifax account it was available to spend. This is a major and serious flaw to the prepay scheme and takes away the ability to book flights spontaneously.

Here in Portugal, I load my card online, and the money gets available immediatly.

When I transfer money from my bank account, it also takes two or three days before it's credited on my "Wirecard".
The trick is always to have on your card money enough to make at least your next booking ...

It's all well and good saying keep enough money on your card until you need it but why should I or anyone give money to Mastercard to hold onto INTEREST FREE until I need it? it's my money and should be earning me interest until I need it, not bloody mastercard!

It's really not that big of an issue......

Rich00cap wrote:It's all well and good saying keep enough money on your card until you need it but why should I or anyone give money to Mastercard to hold onto INTEREST FREE until I need it? it's my money and should be earning me interest until I need it, not bloody mastercard!

Agreed, but you have to look at the other side.
If you use a Visa, you keep the interest for you until the next month, but you pay 5 more euros or pounds for your ticket.
Which largely cancels your gain in interest ...

atoutprix wrote:

Rich00cap wrote:It's all well and good saying keep enough money on your card until you need it but why should I or anyone give money to Mastercard to hold onto INTEREST FREE until I need it? it's my money and should be earning me interest until I need it, not bloody mastercard!

Agreed, but you have to look at the other side.
If you use a Visa, you keep the interest for you until the next month, but you pay 5 more euros or pounds for your ticket.
Which largely cancels your gain in interest ...

Good point well made Autoprix. It's amazing Ryanair don't launch their own pre pay mastercard, imagine the millions of pounds/euros etc they would be holding on behalf of customers without paying interest.

I have a Payzone pre-paid card here in Ireland and its gets updated straight away once I load it. I can check the balance online. Good advice to keep 50e on it at all times so that you can buy cheap flights straight away.

What do we think Ryanair will switch to as their free payment method next year? Once we've all got our prepay mastercards of course!

I booked two flights recently and saved 10e. The set-up costs for the Prepaid came to 9.90e, so I covered my set-up costs on my first transaction. I think Mastercard wil be around for a couple of years.

Rich00cap wrote:What do we think Ryanair will switch to as their free payment method next year? Once we've all got our prepay mastercards of course!

PayPal? Oh, no, hold on a minute, that won't work, too many people already have it - it has to be something not a lot of people know about, let alone have, and preferably it should be something that takes some effort to use, so that peole can't be bothered and would rather pay the Ryanair card paying fee.

Alternatively, Ryanair could start its own payment card scheme up. Not affiliated to Visa or MC (that would cost money), available only from Ryanair, and it would cost a fee to join, and a regular fee to keep unless you had say €500 in the account (guess who gets the interest), but it would be free to use to pay Ryanair tickets with.

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£10 per transaction is far too expensive, however a prepaid mastercard will allow you to avoid this. Obviosuly 2% is taken off when you top it up, depending on what card you choose. But generally it fairs well compared to not using it at all.
Whatever way you look at it £10 is a hugh percentage on the overall ticket, 10% if you are paying £100.
That can make a difference to the overall fare, unless of course you take the steps as you guys. Frequent FR flyers, which some are not.

To receive any beneift on the 2.9% top up fee, you would need to be spending at least £450 on a flight. That would make the £10 fee seem inadequate if of course you can find a fare like that for a single person.
I spent £6 on today's special offer, long anticipated. With the card fee that rose to £16 which is a 140% increase.

OK let's do the math here.

I have a Payzone pre-paid that cost 6 euro to purchase, and a further 3.50 euro to load 100 euro on. That's 9.50 euro before the first transaction. I bought two flights for 9.98 euro. Payzone charged me 2.95% of the transaction = roughly 0.30 euro. I'm up roughly .20 cent after buying the first flights. I won't incur the purchase fee again or the load charge, only the 2.95% purchase fee.

After incuring the set-up costs, It makes sense for me to use the pre-paid to purchase flights up to a value of 335 euro in the one booking at which point the fee for using the pre-paid or a credit card are roughly the same. If the difference between using the pre-paid and credit card are relatively marginal, then I would use the credit card, saving the funds on the pre-paid for cheaper flights.

get a net+ card isntead , its free. and you can choose currency on it...