Neither Use Nor Ornament

“Neither Use Nor Ornament”

Written on: 14/05/2012

I chose to use a travelex cashpassport for a business trip in the US as I have used it before (both in the US and in Europe) and it had been excellent. This was, however, until I had a problem. The online service would not allow me to top up my card (but still managed to freeze most of the available money in my bank account). After several unsuccessful attempts at topping up, I decided to ring the company from their free phone number (it's a good job this number is free - I can only imagine the amount of money I would've spent on hold otherwise). After the lengthy process of going through endless menus, pressing buttons for choices I seem to have made in the previous menu, being on hold for an ungodly amount of time and finally speaking to someone who was obliged to go through nothing short of the Spanish inquisition to ascertain my identity, the staff member informed me that the investigation team were looking into it and I would receive a call to let me know what had gone wrong.

After two days of inevitably not receiving said call, I rang them back, after another 15 minutes of button pushing and Beethoven’s first, someone informed me that they had no idea what the problem was (or that they should have called back) and attempted to top my card up over the phone, which incidentally worked. Due to this being the exact same system (as told to me by the staff member) I have no idea why this did not work in the first place or why my money was frozen.

In addition to this, I made the mistake of allowing the hotel to put a hold on the cash passport. I was informed that this would take ONE MONTH to be reimbursed onto my card by travelex. After explaining to travelex how unacceptable I found this, they informed me that they could fax the hotel and ask for details. After no less than one phone call a day for an entire week to remind them to do this, it was eventually done.

The principle of the card is great, their customer service and call centres however are diabolical.