When is a travel card not a travel card?  When it’s a Travelex Cash Passport!

Why would ANYONE choose to use a Pre-Load Travel Card?  Come on, think about it!  If you were about to go off travelling around the world to far-flung and exotic locations, where beautiful scenery, breathtaking, heartstopping experiences and lifelong memories are there for the taking, you’d want a system whereby you could minimise your charges, have the best flexibility, and have easy and secure online re-loads.  What more could any seasoned traveller want!

Being the ever-sceptical and thorough individuals we are, we spent literally WEEKS looking for what would be the best solution for a daughter who was about to go off on a gap-year voyage to include several countries including USA, New Zealand and the Far-East.

Everything started well: cards arrived, were activated and loaded with a few hundred pounds worth of funds.  Tearful goodbyes at the departure gate heralded a brave new world for a 19 year-old daughter.

All went swimmingly, USA under her belt, she moved on to NZ and was having a whale of a time until it was discovered that all of a sudden no more money could be loaded onto her card.  Wonder why that was.  A few phone conversations with Travelex informed us that there is apparently a limit that can be loaded onto their card online.  A limit of a measly £1500!!!  Thereafter the card is blocked from any further reloads for a period of 60 days, by which time she was supposed to be back home, tucked up in bed.

Now between you, me and the grapevine, £1500 doesn’t get you much when you’re in the business of travelling around the world, seeking all those experiences you’re not going to have once your nose goes against that grindstone of University and Career.  So there she was, in some one-horse town in southern New Zealand with an empty card and no means of re-loading it.

For heaven’s sake, I can’t believe it even now as I type! A ‘Cash Passport’, marketed to the public as the perfect solution to using a card while travelling abroad, that has a re-load limit online of £1500.  Unbelievable!

The purpose of this blog is to warn anyone who is thinking of getting a Travelex Cash Passport travel card for a once-in-a-lifetime trip….. DON’T.  You will be left stranded in the middle of your trip with no option to re-load funds online.  The customer service staff at Travelex kept insisting that ‘It’s in the Terms and Conditions’, but when pressed, were unable to locate it themselves and we were certainly unable to find anything that informed us of such a limit on reloads.

DON’T DO IT!  Look for an alternative card and tell all your friends not to use it.  It’ll leave you stranded halfway through your trip with an empty account and no way to re-fill it.  Think instead about something like the FairFX or CaxtonFX cards instead.