Using a credit- or debit- card in Dubai is a natural thing. As with most other developed countries this is one of the features that normally works. During most of the shopping festivals around here we see a major amount of advertisements for VISA, MasterCard ,Diners, American Express and so on. Usually one of the credit card companies have teamed up with a Bank and several of the shopping malls and other outlets so that you can earn points for life for every dollar you spend. Once you have your gold card another bank comes up with a platinum, or why not the latest titanium card. The banks keep calling us to tell us how good their card is and why we must have it. Just use it and earn points you can even use on the airlines. Why not! They are very surprised when I tell them to never call me again as it seems they believe they have the offer of a lifetime. (Have a friend who actually took them up on the offer.. 8 months later he had still not received the card or was it the pincode to use it… And guess what the shopping festival had ended.)

It worked perfect for a while, I have a VISA and MasterCard from my usual bank and not a Dubai based one, so don’t need any more cards thus I don’t earn any points… But neither do I pay all the various transaction fees that they invent meanwhile. Until lately, that is.

I normally fuel up at the most prevailing fuel chains. It is two Dubai based companies that somehow are still owned by the same company and they almost have a monopoly in Dubai for the fuel stations. I know of one other chain also but to find a fuelstation from them is virtually impossible.

4 months ago the large ones announced that it was too expensive for them to cover the Creditcard fees so they would charge 1.5% or 2% on each transaction. I did not really complain about the 2 Dirham they charge me extra but it felt crazy… the reason for using the card should be benefiting the company probably more than me as it means no cash to move around thus less risk of robbery.

To my surprise it was getting more and more difficult though to use the cards. The attendants kept coming back to me saying “card no work!” Looking at the 4-5 slips they had it was evident that the card did work but their machines did not. Transaction cancelled was the error code so normally I sent the guys back and voila! it worked.

Now yesterday I tried to fuel up and pay with my card again and the guy simply informed we “we don’t accept credit-cards anymore!”

Hmmm. Well looking at how things work in Dubai in general I am not really surprised. It seems everything is about how to move costs around and try to gain maximum amount of profit for a few in the shortest possible time. I guess it is not unlike any other place but to stop accepting credit cards that must be a novelty in this day and age. Are they on to something the rest of us don’t know about yet?!

Maybe the fuel company got fed up trying to access the lines to the bank 5 times as they could only charge for one transaction try…. maybe it is the bank that is not catching up with their internal connections?.. for sure this is the case with the local bank we normally use for our office!, or maybe it is the telephone company lines that simply can not catch up with the expansion in the country..still charging for each call tried between the fuel station and the bank, thus they earn their money while no transaction could be made, or maybe it is that all these credit card offers in reality look nice on the surface, and the easy way out of delivering all the points is to close down the services people use and then maybe re-create them in the future, under a new name not in the list of participating companies.. Thus avoiding people to amass enough points to make it worth anything.

I have no clue what the answer is but I just cant figure out why a major chain would suddenly stop having people pay this way. Oh by the way you can though still get their internal fuel payment cards and pay with them 😉 I dont know but I would guess it works on pre-payment 😉

I do though know that the price has always been cheaper in the next Emirate, Abu Dhabi, and guess what?! They have never charged for using the credit cards !? Even from their large almost monopoly size company.