If you pay for your petrol at the pump, enjoy regular hotel breaks, or like to hire a car when you go on holiday, you are probably aware of what a credit card hold is.
It is when a company temporarily blocks a set amount of your card’s outstanding credit limit to ensure you have the means to pay for goods you have yet to receive.
It’s a way for it to guarantee you have sufficient credit when it’s time to pay up – whether for refuelling the car or checking out of a hotel and settling up for the midnight raids on the mini-bar.
It is a system designed to protect companies from fraudsters and chancers – and in the case of self-payment pumps, it is also used to verify motorists have the financial means to pay before they start putting fuel in their tanks.
Yet the use of credit card holds has not been universally welcomed.
Annoying: If you pay for your petrol at the pump, enjoy regular hotel breaks, or like to hire a car when you go on holiday, you are probably aware what a credit card hold is
Some consumers have not been able to use their cards as a result of companies being slow to withdraw the holds, leaving them with insufficient funds to pay for goods. In the case of some hotels, it can take a couple of weeks for the hold to be removed. Most infuriating.
Others have suffered the ignominy of a transaction being declined because they do not have enough credit available to meet the holding amount demanded by the merchant (an issue sometimes with self-payment pumps).
In the case of people returning a hire car at the end of their holiday, the reserved credit can be plundered by the car company to cover the cost of repairing scratches or filling the petrol tank back to full.
The terms of the credit card hold – length and amount – are decided by the retailer, and customers should be told beforehand how much of their credit is being reserved.
Yet individual retailers are reluctant to shed any light on the individual policies they adopt – the amount of credit they reserve against the cards of customers and the time it takes to unwind a hold.
Hotel groups De Vere, Marriott and IHG failed to provide answers, as did car hire company Avis. Only Europcar played ball. Fishy.
In theory, there is nothing wrong with credit card holds, but in practice, companies hold all the cards. They should do more to ensure consumers are treated fairly – and compensation paid when holds are not removed in a timely fashion.
If you have suffered as a result of a credit card hold, please email me at [email protected].
Should you take the Woodford compensation offer?
It is decision time for those investors who lost money as a result of the meltdown of investment fund Woodford Equity Income.
The decision that investors (at the time the fund was suspended) must make in the next couple of weeks is whether to accept the redress on offer as a result of a deal struck between the City regulator and Link – or reject it.
> Read more from Jeff: Clock is ticking for Woodford investors to decide on redress, but is this offer fair?
Shoppers who made me Blush…
Cashing in: Jeff collecting for Children In Need
A big thank you to those shoppers who kindly stopped to say hello eight days ago and put a few welcome coins in my Children In Need bucket.
I was collecting at The Oracle, a vast indoor shopping complex on the banks of the River Kennet in Reading, Berkshire.
Although one donor mistook me for Keith Chegwin, I didn’t have the heart to tell them that the brilliant Cheggers sadly passed away nearly six years ago.
Another shopper, a Mail on Sunday reader, spent 15 minutes telling me what he thought about the Government (unprintable) – and then marched off without donating a penny.
I trust he is now a little bit happier in light of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s decision to honour the triple lock and increase the state pension by 8.5 per cent from next April.
My attempt to entice shoppers to buy a small Pudsey Bear and his companion Blush fell on deaf ears, even when I said that my colleague Toby Walne (a collecting expert) thought Blush could prove a shrewd long-term investment.
On the back of Toby’s advice, I am now a proud owner of Blush, who will join my collection of football memorabilia in storage.
Donate: bbcchildreninneed.co.uk.
Insurers are taking the biscuit
A friend grabbed me last weekend while walking round Dinton Pastures Country Park in the dark as part of an event organised by First Days Children’s Charity.
She wanted to know why her car insurance had jumped from £492 to £708, an increase of 44 per cent. This is despite a no-claims record going back more than a decade.
My friend is a police officer who knows how to handle a car and is a stickler when it comes to observing speed limits.
She is also a single mother who lives on a tight budget and spends a lot of her income on paying for pre and post-school clubs (and other activities) for her energetic (and delightful) eight-year-old daughter. ‘It’s a rip-off,’ she told me. Even shopping around has failed to work for her.
‘Insurers are taking the biscuit,’ she added. I could do no more than nod in agreement. After all, it’s an argument I have been putting forward since the start of the year. Insurers are taking us for fools.
