Card companies blocking holidaymakers abroad from accessing their money

Card companies are preventing holidaymakers from accessing their money abroad, according to a survey. Around 26 per cent of people who had used their card while travelling had experienced that they were being blocked by their provider with nearly 61 per cent of those claiming they had notified their bank that they were going on holiday, according to uSwitch.com.

When people were barred from holiday spending they found it time-consuming and costly to resolve the issue, according to the research. They said they spent around an hour typically sorting the problem out as they made phone calls to their bank.

Twenty-seven per cent of the people also said they were left feeling stressed and anxious, while 22 per cent had to borrow money from family and friends to get through to the end of the trip.

In 15 per cent of the cases, it took over 24 hours for the card companies to reactivate their blocked cards.

According to uSwitch.com, banks should provide customers with an automatic refund of any costs associated with reactivating their credit or debit card, if the bank had been advised in advance about the overseas trip.

Tom Lyon, a money expert at uSwitch.com, said, "Banks need to up their game and look to technology to ensure that they are providing consumers with an efficient service when they are stranded abroad with a blocked card, The Telegraph reported.

Blocked bank cards have cost holiday-making Brits a total of £240m, largely due to hefty phone bills incurred after trying to reactivate their cards from abroad, new research shows.

Although banks typically blocked cards for security reasons, according to 19 per cent of holidaymakers, banks should use technology to identify genuine fraud. For instance, GPS tracking could be used to figure out how far a user's card was from their phone at the point of purchase, or being able to unblock users' cards through the provider's app.