Credit card travel notices provide advance notification to card issuers that you will be traveling abroad, helping prevent their decisions to decline your card transactions due to suspicion of fraudulent use.
Some card issuers require travelers to notify them about upcoming travel arrangements, while others suggest doing so and may provide ways for it online. Here’s how it works:
How to Set a Travel Notification
Process for setting a travel notice may differ depending on your card issuer, with most banks offering online or mobile applications for this task. You typically must enter information such as destination(s), dates, and trip locations when creating one. Some cards (such as those without foreign transaction fees) do not require travel notifications as their fraud detection practices can detect suspicious charges regardless of where you may travel to.
Other credit cards may have stricter fraud detection policies that could freeze your account if they detect transactions that deviate from your normal spending patterns. When this is the case, it’s worth spending a minute or two informing your card issuer of your plans – it could save hours of frustration when trying to make expensive purchases or book airfare home!
Online
If you plan on traveling abroad, notifying your card issuer in advance can decrease the chance of your charges being declined. This can be done online or over the phone.
Chase credit cards offer travel notification via their website, giving you access to multiple dates as well as details like planned layovers.
Chase advises customers to update their contact information prior to leaving home, download the Citi Mobile App on mobile devices and monitor accounts while traveling with them. Furthermore, Chase suggests making note of when you will travel in order to recognize legitimate transactions more easily.
As technology has advanced, card issuers no longer rely on travel notifications as an efficient method to anticipate cardholder travel plans; rather they employ other strategies like analyzing recent purchase history or transaction patterns to anticipate them and enable more confident authorizations of transactions without cardholders having to call back later to report errors.
Over the Phone
Card issuers usually offer customers the ability to set travel notices over the phone; for instance, Chase cards allow customers to set alerts up to one year ahead by calling them directly or visiting their profile and settings page on their website.
Stephen lives in Pittsburgh and plans on visiting Thailand soon. To ensure his travel goes as smoothly as possible, he contacts his issuer’s call center and informs a representative about his dates and destinations of travel, which will then be entered into Visa Travel Notification Service (TNS). When Stephen makes purchases while abroad using TNS enabled purchases are approved more confidently.
Many card issuers do not require travel notifications from cardholders; rather, they employ various strategies to anticipate impending travel and assess whether charges from out-of-town locations are suspicious or valid, including reviewing recent shopping history and spending patterns over time.
In Person
Some credit card issuers offer the ability to create travel notices by visiting one of their branches directly and speaking to a representative, providing all the pertinent details about your plans, such as dates and destinations.
Some card issuers also provide tools that allow cardholders to set travel notifications via mobile apps, making this approach more suitable for some individuals.
Visa offers card issuers a service that allows them to incorporate information provided by cardholders about their travel plans into a VisaNet authorization message, providing more confidence when authorizing transactions while cardholders travel and reducing any potential miscalculation of declined transactions.
Chase offers travel notices via its website and mobile app as well as calling its customer service number on the back of a card, though due to improved fraud detection capabilities the company no longer recommends setting notifications in advance.
