Question: What do you do when your offspring arrives home a couple of days before heading off to the remotest parts of South America for six weeks, and declares the only source of cash he is taking with him is a Maestro debit card?
Answer: Panic. While Visa and Mastercard are reasonably widely accepted worldwide, who has ever heard of Maestro?
Over the coming weeks armies of young people will be setting off for far-flung corners of the globe for summer adventures or gap ye
ars, without giving much, if any, thought about how they will access cash and, having grown up in the age of ATM cash dispensers, cannot easily envisage a world where money is not readily available.
One such is our son Edward, who, as I write, is wandering around the jungle of Peru with Maestro card in backpack, before moving on to Bolivia, Chile, Argentina and so forth. The Maestro card comes with his student account. Students are generally fobbed off with these little-known brands, including Solo and Electron. Try using those on the edge of the Sahara.
So what is a parent to do? Some might be tempted to give them one of their own Visa or Mastercards and PIN numbers to take as a back-up; a thought that occurred to his father, but was dismissed. "What would we do if the bank rang to check who was using the card in South America?" he wondered.
You would have to have a screw loose to allow a youngster to wander the world with your PIN and card without the agreement of the bank, especially as you would be breaching the terms of the contract.
Should your offspring be robbed and the card used, you would have no protection and could end up liable for tens of thousands of pounds. So how easy is it to get the bank to make a concession?
"You must not give him your card. He could be arrested and thrown into a South American jail," one bank told us. Just what a mother wants to hear. "We know some parents do it, but we strongly advise against it," said another with gentler customer services.
Given more notice there were options we might have pursued. It should be possible to add a child either to a credit card or bank account as a joint accountholder, which would give them access to a card legitimately. They have to go through identity checks, which takes seven to ten working days.
Another alternative should have been the traditional back-up of travellers' cheques, but I failed to find any bank locally that would sell me dollar cheques on the spot.
A better alternative might have been a pre-paid cashcard, such as Travelex's cash passport. But no one mentioned that until after he departed on the Monday.
On further investigation, though, it seems Maestro is linked to Mastercard and is its debit card, so similar to the Visa debit card. On that basis, I am assured it should be accepted reasonably well in South America, but not as well as either a Visa or Mastercard.
He did though tell his bank would be travelling, in the hope that a stop would not be placed on his card the minute he begins using it in Peru.
Finally, when parents get a call that their child's backpack has been stolen with their card, what can they do? Western Union is one of the fastest ways of transferring money around the world and typically costs £14 to send £100, but transfers cash in a couple of hours.
The full article contains 612 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
