London for a first Timer.

[MrsEmmaPeel]

We found a wonderful way to turn basically any credit card into a contactless one - if you have a smartphone that phone supports Apple Pay or Android Pay, add the card to that. We used one of each around England, Ireland, NI, Scotland and France and it was wonderful. Both were accepted equally. We added our "no foreign transaction fee" cards in our E-wallets, and especially for purchases 30GBP/EUR and under, it was simply magical (to a US-based family, where contactless is sadly NOT ubiquitous yet).

 

Tip - watch the display; some systems will automatically sense a US credit card and try to charge it in USD. Normally, the exchange rate can be a lot worse than your card, so we kindly asked them to switch it to local currency and they always did without complaint.

 

Oh, and note that this will work even if you have put GB/EU SIMs in your phone for the trip. We set up our payment at home in the US, and swapped in new SIMs, and payment just worked from then on.

 

On Android, if you note contactless stops working, just fire up Google Pay on the phone and you'll likely find that the master switch on the front page has disabled. We sometimes saw this happen when changing countries. Just re-enable and you'll be back in operation.

[josephml1]

Thanks for The advice [emoji3]

 

 

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