Full disclosure of online transaction fees

Lorraine and I recently went on holiday for a week which was brilliant, but the down side of living in Scotland is that flights to long haul destinations are usually from an airport in England, in this case Manchester.

If you fly from Manchester I’d highly recommend the valet parking, it was just £13 more the off airport parking and you just dropped your car 2 minutes’ walk from departures and collected it from the same place, brilliant!  Sorry I digress.

We arrived early and the airport was very quiet which was a nice change, so we were left with some time on our hands.  After a delicious breakfast we did a bit of shopping.  As you may know I’m a bit of a petrol head and I decided I’d give the raffle for a car a try.  You know the ones you see at all the airports.

Well £40 later (or so I thought) I’d got 10 tickets for a car and another 10 for a holiday.  The draw for the holiday was done and I’ve not won but the draw for the car is in a few days, fingers crossed.

The point of this story is that it was not £40.  Firstly I was asked to pay 50p for the transaction which was fine as it was disclosed. However I just got my credit card bill and I found I’d been charged £3 for a cash transaction fee and 89p for cash interest.  I called Capital One to be told that spending money on gambling was considered a cash transaction even though I’d not received any cash. They talked to me like I should have known this, do you? I certainly didn’t but I do now.

So the £40 ticket is now £44.36, a 10% surcharge that I was not expecting.

I am extremely unimpressed at this charge and my feelings towards both “Best of the Best” and “Capital One” have taken a severe knocking.

Of course if I win the car all will be forgiven but it demonstrates the breach of trust and my disappointed at being penalised for making what I thought was a standard card transaction.