Commonwealth Bank of Australia Travel Money Card

Before we left for Europe I organised a CBA Travel Money Card, which is a pre-paid ‘MasterCard'. It allows you to store money in several different currencies, can be used in ATM machines, and is widely accepted as a MasterCard credit card in shops. A big selling point is that it’s easily replaced if lost or stolen, and that if it is lost or stolen then your normal bank accounts can’t be cleaned-out by the thieves.

It was the first time we’ve used a card like this. On previous overseas trips we just used credit cards and our eftpos card.

Late last year the Australian Financial Review provided a useful review of many travel money card products including the American Express one, and the Travelex cashpassport. These two, and the CBA Travel Money Card made-up our short-list. From memory, the AMEX product was rated the best for our particular needs but I had concerns about whether the AMEX product would be as widely accepted as the CBA Travel Money Card product which is used as a MasterCard.

So we chose the CBA product for our trip.

Overall, the card worked as expected. There were a couple of stores in Italy where their card reader wouldn’t accept it so we had to revert to using a credit card for payment.

‘Recharging’ the card is straight-forward if you have a secure Internet access method as you have to log-on to your CBA Netbank account then do a bPay payment to the card. Or you can do it by telephone banking. Caution though: bPay can take up to 3 days for the funds to reach the Travel Money Card from your transaction account. Ah, the bank float: using your money for their profit!

At one point we worried that a bogus transaction might have been made on the card so I called the bank’s 24/7 international Customer Service Centre number back in Australia, using a pre-paid international calling card to do so.

You can also call the Customer Service Centre to check your balance, or go to the CBA website to check on-line what your card balance is. But you want to be careful that you are using a secure Internet connection in doing the latter as your user name, password and card number are required to check the balance.

It surprised me to find out that the pre-paid phone calling card starts charging for the international call as soon as the number starts ringing, not, as I’d expect, when the call is answered. This wouldn’t normally be a problem but when the ‘24/7’ customer service centre number isn’t answered for minutes, ringing, ringing, ringing, your pre-paid calling card balance quickly gets eroded. 

This was quite frustrating that my call wasn’t answered within what I thought was a reasonable amount of time. I had to hang-up and call again after minutes waiting while the service centre number rang and rang and rang and rang-out. The costs incurred while listening to the phone ring and ring grew so much that I actually had to hang-up and recharge my calling card because of the length of time waiting for the Travel Money Card people to answer the phone.

Once my call was answered the service was fine. But I imagined how terrible it would have been if my card had been stolen and I didn’t have a way of enduring the unacceptably long delay in having my call answered as the phone card would probably also have been lost in my wallet.

It happened each time I called the service centre so it wasn’t just bad luck of calling at an exceptionally busy time.

The pre-paid international calling card I used was one from eKit, provided in the document pouch for escorted tours like the ones we did with Insight Tours in central Europe, then the Trafalgar tour in Italy. It’s easy to use, easy to recharge using a credit card, but probably not the least expensive option. My advice with the calling cards is to check the contract fine print to find when the charging starts – when you call is answered, or when your call starts to ring.