During the Vancouver Olympics not only were we not permitted to use other credit cards, we couldn't even use our bank-issued debit cards for payment (in Canada we don't have Visa Debit cards - our debit cards are issued directly from banks have been accepted everywhere for nearly two decades.)
Cash or Visa Only.
So there I was at an official Olympic souvenir shop picking up some gifts when I was told no - I'd have to walk down to the other end of the airport terminal and take out cash... come back and pay with that.
Needless to say they lost the sale. How many other sales did they lose I wonder?
> Needless to say they lost the sale. How many other sales did they lose I wonder?
Surely not enough to cover the massive amount of money Visa paid to be an exclusive sponsor. In London this year that is reportedly over $100M and during the first week Visa racked up $700 million worth of charges at the games.
Interesting. What you're implying is that the marketing benefits of Visa become a sponsor are secondary to the direct revenue it generates at the event.
This could be the most profitable marketing spend with the quickest ROI ever.
"$700 million worth of charges" Visa only gets 2-5% of the charge. Lets assume on the high end at 5% we are talking about only 35 million in income. Even doubling that for the second week we get 70 million (before costs). How is that the quickest ROI ever? Sounds like a bad marketing move backed up by a loss of profits. Maybe the real winners were the olympic committee or the other credit card companies that bid up the price against Visa.
Visa's in it for the interest payments. For every consumer that doesn't pay their bill in full each month ... they've got months and/or years of interest piled on top of paying back whatever they spent.
No, I'm saying that any lost sales the IOC sees from people who don't have cash or Visa will be more than made up by the huge amount of cash Visa paid to be a sponsor. The $700m figure just shows that the exclusive relationship is doing just fine.
More likely, in my mind: The IOC gets the marketing money from Visa, while the independent vendors at the Olympics take the hit from not being able to accept MasterCard.
Moreover, the terms the independent vendors get are likely extremely onerous, such that they are likely the ones shafted with inventory for items that don't sell.
The IOC gets the money coming and going. Which is good to support, you know, amateur athletics.
Visa seems to be pushing these into the Canadian market. In Toronto, they have ads for Visa debit cards running the length of buses / subway cars. Looks like it's only being offered through major banks though. (Though I guess that doesn't apply retroactively to the Vancouver Olympics... ;-)
Wow, I would have been screwed. I had to look in my wallet because I truly didn't know if I had a Visa. I just have a card my bank provided and it happens to be Master Card. And I rarely carry around much cash.
In the US it's common for merchants to always take both, it's not so elsewhere. I did take a taxi once in the US that only took one and not the other - and not the one I had.
That ended up as a half hour drive around town looking for an outdoor ATM.
Another interesting "feature" of credit cards is that they tend to charge a percentage for foreign transactions, and so do the banks that back the cards.
I work retail, and we're forced to charge slightly different rates to credit card users (store policy, I don't agree with it!). However most new debit cards in New Zealand these days are Visa ones, which confuse the hell out of me. Some banks don't put "debit" on the card and our machine will show "ASB Visa" for others.
I hope you guys are doing that by giving cash discount, instead of charging extra on credit (yeah, I know). That is against both visa's and mastercard's terms of service, and they will go after you for that.
Hm. In North America, the surcharge is against VISA terms of service (linky Canadian government resource below - the terms of services are largely the same within North America). In addition, surcharges are illegal in 10 US states.
Cash or Visa Only.
So there I was at an official Olympic souvenir shop picking up some gifts when I was told no - I'd have to walk down to the other end of the airport terminal and take out cash... come back and pay with that.
Needless to say they lost the sale. How many other sales did they lose I wonder?