this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2026
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Don't be mean. I promise to do my best to judge that fairly.
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It may not be part of your life, but I've done it hundreds of time as a travelling tech (plus a few as a tourist), and I've had times when airports with hundreds/thousands of rental cars had trouble satisfying demand, so it seems there are others with the same need.
And no, they don't accept SEPA, although terms vary by country, and if they do they require a safety deposit that can go from a few hundred euros to the thousands, not exactly practical.
How is a deposit not practical? Unless they require it in cash that has to then at the end be picked up at the pickup point (which would be crazy)? A rental company is taking a huge risk by renting cars to any random person with a driving license. It's the same reason they don't typically rent to people below 25 (or without a higher deposit).
It's really only unpractical if you don't have enough money on your account to afford the deposit, but then why are you renting cars? Otherwise you just pay a bit more the first time and then get that money deposited back on your account when you return the car. There's basically no difference in the end other than a bigger number the first time, and if you wreck the car or something, you will lose the deposit through your credit card too.
You need to have the money and manage it going back and forth, a credit card's CREDIT requires 0 management.
Yeah, that's why they like credit cards, they can guarantee a safety deposit HIGHER than your monthly withdrawal limit.
Let's say I'm poor, my car breaks down, I need to go to work otherwise I'll lose it, not everywhere has public transport options, I guess if I don't have an extra 1k€ on my account to pay for the deposit, I can get fucked, right? Shouldn't have been poor.
Shit americans say, I swear.
My man, if you rely on a car for work but your company doesn't provide you transportation, you're being exploited. If you live in the middle of the forest so there is no public transport around because squirrels keep chewing tram rails or whatever, but whatever your employer is paying you isn't covering your anti-squirrel measures, then again, you're being exploited. Contact your union rep, quit your job, find something normal. If you can't find anything, apply for one of a many government programs that will pay you stipend to learn skills that will allow you to start working for something other than whatever shady shit you did before.
But we're glaring over the most fun part of this all, the fact that I don't think there are places in Europe where you can rent a car from a renter that requires you to pay only with MasterVisa, but there is no public transportation around.
Add to this the fact that you talk about credit card as if it's normal to have one in Europe, and I am beginning to suspect that you don't actually know what you're talking about
Being traveling tech is absolutely not usual occupancy, so it doesn't change what I said. But if you work in Europe and traveling around, and moving around instruments is part of your job, you should have a company card anyway for it, so again, it doesn't really matter for the rest of Europeans.
What I'm trying to convey, that even though you will have some incompetence without American run banking systems, unless you're in a very specific operation, like needing to rent a car at an airport for example, you wouldn't be severely inconvenient.
I'm saying it as a refugee from a country that (for justifiable reasons) is getting some negativity around, and being born there I'm deemed not actually a good person in advance, and it took me a lot of time to convince various governments that I'm not a dangerous exemplar of my race. The time I spent without access to international banking systems like Visa weren't debilitating, even though inconvenient at times.
Being a travelling tech is fairly common, but even more common is being a sales rep or any other office worker that requires travelling. Who do you think takes the thousands of flights that go everyday between european airports, all tourists?
Not having access to those circuits IS a handicap, also because once you're outside the EU, they're your only option. But hey, if you people want to cover your ears and avoid listening, I will not waste any more time.
Being a traveling whatever and having to pay out of pocket for your transportation not only isn't common, a lot of the time it's illegal. And if your company setup that you pay first and get reimbursements later, you just ask your boss to issue you a company card since yours was taken away for trying to whistleblow, it's entirely not a big deal.
You're comming up with more and more contrived scenarios that are based on more and more improbable sets of circumstances that only work if you saw Europe on TV and imagined that it's like America but people talk in funny way.