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Comment by markus92 | Hacker News Reader

American credit cards work just fine with OV Pay for both NS and regional public transport (tried it with a Chase Visa card). Side note: Albert Heijn also finally started accepting them, so credit cards are now accepted at almsot all merchants.

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When did AH start accepting anything besides NL debit? I have a US debit card that didn't work as recently as Nov 2022. It was a major pain in the ass taking cash out of the ATM right next to the checkout just to buy groceries for a month while I waited on approval for a Dutch bank account.

Silly me at the time didn't realize I could go next door to Jumbo and pay with whatever the hell I wanted... live and learn!

My limited anecdotal evidence from going to an AH in Amsterdam as a tourist just last week, the card terminal still had a sticker on it saying "No Visa/Mastercard". That said, did a quick Google and this Reddit post[0] (in Dutch) implies that perhaps even the terminals with that sticker accept debit/credit cards as of 4 months ago.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/geldzaken/comments/1085e6t/albert_h...

I believe it was around the beginning of 2023. Maestro has been deprecated and no further cards will be issued from July this year, so all merchants need to start accepting other card types (Mastercard/Visa Debit) by then at the latest.

Hopefully this will put an end to the common perception in NL that Mastercard/Visa == credit card. Most of them aren't!

Very recently, January this year it worked for the first time in an average neighborhood AH for me.

Funny note: Aldi accepts everything, even AMEX.

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