Riviera Pebbles Blog: The change for our booking and admin fee

Posted on 1st Jan 2018 in Guest Info

Credit cards

From 13 January 2018, all retailers are forbidden to charge for credit card transactions under the EU's Payment Services Directive. Yet, all retailers still have to pay the credit card company for facilitating.

The EU ban affects all surcharges on Visa and Mastercard payments, but the UK has gone further by also putting this ban onto American Express and Paypal too.

The reality is that on-line retailers, including Pebbles, are now forced to adapt by raising prices to cover the extra costs of the card payment. Pebbles has now had to implement the change and increase the booking fee from a standard £20 to 5%. This will cover the credit card cost, plus old booking fee, in one payment.

The advice to the tourist industry from ABTA is to charge or increase the booking fee. However, to avoid breaching the directive, we have to charge on ALL bookings, not just the credit card ones. For most guests, this issue will have no real net effect because 90% of our guests have historically paid by credit card and incurred the credit card fee anyway.

We apologise to the 10% of guests who have previously used debit cards rather than credit cards and previously saved an average of £15 per booking. If this bothers you, we can arrange for you to pay by bank transfer but we will also need to take a security deposit by bank transfer. Please contact us to arrange.

All we can hope is that once the UK leaves the EU it might take a different approach on this EU Directive. As ABTA commented in July 2017:

"preventing travel companies and other retailers from passing on the often excessively high charges they face when taking card payments, risks increasing prices for everyone, regardless of how they pay. We will be writing to the Government, highlighting the particular concerns of travel agents and providing examples of how these new rules will negatively impact the travel industry and their customers"