Self Serve Fuel Warning

Those morons have a $150 hold on the account!

While this isn't a big deal in this case, BEWARE if you use a debit
card with a credit card logo! A couple of stops like this on a
decently long trip could tie up quite a bit of money!

A bit off topic, but this is a HUGE issue in the lodging industry, too.

When you reserve a hotel room with a credit or debit card, we
"pre-authorize" the dollar amount of the suite on your card. (Which is
what your FBO was doing, BTW. Usually you have to enter the "expected"
amount of your purchase in those self-service pumps -- didn't it ask you how
much you expected to buy? That is the number they will try to
"pre-authorize" on your card.)

With a credit card, this only "ties up" some of your available credit.

(In other words, if you have a $5000 credit limit, and we pre-authorize a
$140 suite, you now only have a $4860 credit limit, until we "turn" the
pre-authorization into a charge, or until it "expires" -- a period of time
determined by your bank and/or credit card company)

With a DEBIT card, however (which too many people use interchangeably with a
credit card), this pre-authorization "ties up" $140 from your available
balance in your checking account! So, if you have $300 in your account,
and you pre-authorize a $140 suite, you now have an effective checking
account balance of just $160!

As you can see, unless you have a large surplus of money in your account, it
would be easy to end up bouncing checks all over town in this scenario.
The REAL scam of this is that we (the merchant) do NOT have your money --
but neither do you. The bank simply HOLDS it for a period of time. Worse,
once done, I cannot un-do a preauthorization -- only your bank can. (Try
explaining THAT to a guest who just kited a few checks, thanks to their
future hotel reservation!)

Now, multiply this times a few million transactions per day, and you can see
that the banks LOVE this system. They are making billions in interest off
of that "float" that neither you, nor I, actually have.

We've come up with a solution, of sorts. After being screamed at a few
dozen times by folks who simply didn't understand how their debit cards
work, we now ASK each and every reservation what kind of card they are
using, and we strongly advise against using a debit card to make a
reservation. We'll still accept them, but we explain -- in gory detail --
exactly what can happen to them if they are "close to the edge" with their
checking account balance.

In fact, the last three hotels Mary and I stayed in had big signs posted at
the reservation desk warning guests NOT to use their debit cards.
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"
"B A R R Y" wrote in message
...
Folks,

Yesterday, I bought less than $20 of self-serve fuel @ MGJ
(Montgomery-Orange County, NY). The receipt printer was broken, so
this morning, I checked the card web site for the charge data. The
credit card I use for flying has instant web updates.


The consumer advocates have made such a big deal of this that I
typically see $1 holds (if I see one at all) for auto gas stations.
Apparently, the tide hasn't caught up with these guys yet.