Paying ADP with American Express BEWARE

I'm travelling to the USA at the end of February and recently received an email from Virgin Atlantic asking me to pay the Additional Passenger duty via their website. ALL THOSE PAYING WITH VIRGIN ATLANTIC AMERICAN EXPRESS BEWARE. I followed the instructions and was eventually transferred to Paypal and paid the due amount £120. Two days later I noticed that I had been charged £126.05. What Virgin Atlantic nor Paypal fail to tell you is that if you pay with the VA Amex card your payment will be converted into dollars and then back to sterling. This adds about 5% to the overall charge. I've contacted Virgin Atlantic and receive no response. After numerous long phonecalls eventually managed to get my money back from MBNA. Not at happy bunny!!![V]

[Neil]

Hi and welcome to the forum[y]

You are quite correct in what you are saying and it is an important point that isn't made clear on either the VS or Paypal site. Paypal do Amex transactions in $ and then convert to GBP.

It is something that has mentioned a couple of times on pages 4/5 & 7 of this main APD thread.

Neil

[Pete]

I think it may be wise for Virgin Atlantic to make mention of this on their APD page, as since they are touting an Amex card bearing a Virgin Atlantic logo, their choice of PayPal on this occassion would seem ill-advised.

[fozzyo]

Originally posted by pixuk
I think it may be wise for Virgin Atlantic to make mention of this on their APD page, as since they are touting an Amex card bearing a Virgin Atlantic logo, their choice of PayPal on this occassion would seem ill-advised.

Have to say I was rather surprised at the use of Paypal in general.

Is there no other way to pay other than through paypal[:0]

Originally posted by jaguarpig
Is there no other way to pay other than through paypal[:0]

This is what I'm wondering - isn't there the option to pay at check in, or via the premier tam if going UC??

Oh s**t I had no idea, just paid out £80 for our APD on my AMEX [V]

[mitchja]

You can pay at check-in (but you wont get the vouchers though). From the VS web site:

If I pay at the airport can how can I pay?

Cash will be accepted along with all major credit and debit cards with the exception of Discovery cards. Cheques will not be accepted.

Regards

My advice is to complain to VS Amex and insist on a refund of the currency conversion.
If they refuse then put this transaction into dispute.
You transaction was for a UK duty, charged in Sterling by a UK based company and paid for with a UK issued creditcard and as such there is no need to carry out an unneccassary currency conversion.
Also the currency conversion was completely unauthorised by yourself and as such, IMHO, borders on being illegal.

Not with VS, but I was the victim of the same currency conversion costs last year.
Credit to Virgin, they very quickly refunded the extra costs when I contacted them.

Originally posted by pixuk
I think it may be wise for Virgin Atlantic to make mention of this on their APD page, as since they are touting an Amex card bearing a Virgin Atlantic logo, their choice of PayPal on this occassion would seem ill-advised.

Hear, hear [^]

Originally posted by Tim
My advice is to complain to VS Amex and insist on a refund of the currency conversion.
If they refuse then put this transaction into dispute.
You transaction was for a UK duty, charged in Sterling by a UK based company and paid for with a UK issued creditcard and as such there is no need to carry out an unneccassary currency conversion.
Also the currency conversion was completely unauthorised by yourself and as such, IMHO, borders on being illegal.

Gosh Tim, I was about to make much the same comments! It smacks of - well, almost money laundering. We're being bludgeoned into paying an extra amount for merchandise already bought and paid for, and then being charged extta hidden costs on top? Scandalous....I just keep feeling SRB has got into bed with the wrong people, in going into cahoots with MBNA. There seems to be little to be said for Amex from out point of view. Am definitely going to drop Amex.....

So Mastercard doesn't try to charge extra?

Mastercard/Visa will not charge extra if you have a sterling Mastercard or Visa. Paypal bills Mastercard & Visa in Sterling but Amex in USD.

I don't know what screen you end up with when you use the link from the VS website to make a one-off payment but when I login to my paypal account to make a payment and select my VS Amex as the funding source, it gives me the following message:

Source of Funds


American Express cards will be charged in USD. Paying with American Express will result in currency conversion fees if your card is not denominated in USD and/or if you send a non-USD payment.

If you use Amex to pay at check-in you shouldn't be charged extra either. It's just using Amex via Paypal that results in the currency conversion charges.

That's a bit off really - it should have been made clear.Seems odd though why VS are now using paypal too

Whenever i have used my AMEX card to pay through PayPal i get the saem message as hzv5wk. Yes it is annoying but i would be surprised if this message did not appear somewhere when you used your AMEX card to pay the APD using PayPal.

Originally posted by mitchja
You can pay at check-in (but you wont get the vouchers though). From the VS web site:

If I pay at the airport can how can I pay?

Cash will be accepted along with all major credit and debit cards with the exception of Discovery cards. Cheques will not be accepted.

Regards

What is a Discovery card?

Why the hell have Paypal been recruited into this? For an organisation the size of Virgin (or the airline, or however it works) I'm baffled they are using something as low-rent as Paypal for this! [:0]

Actually, from a surface standpoint, PayPal does make sense.

PayPal charges less per transaction than most banks for card transactions. (I'm not talking about OUR fees, but the fees VS pay to use PayPal.) PayPal does not require credit cards for all transactions; one can link a regular bank account to it, and send money for less than a bank transfer fee. That stops the whinge from non-credit-card users (yes, some people still pay with cash[:0]) who need to advance-pay the APD.

I agree with the dissent over the fees, but I can understand why the payment method seemed alluring to VS. It was a way to take payments from several countries and somewhat lessen the chances of stolen cards and lengthy transfer times (many bank card systems pay with a 90-day lag; PayPal is much more timely than that - if the APD must be paid faster than that, VS would have to float the payments until the actual payments are deposited from the system accepting the card numbers! That's a lot of float). From a banker's point-of-view, PayPal and its 10-days max, and often much faster payment system makes financial sense. At least for VS, that is.

The major mistake VS made was not checking into the Amex transfer fees, and not making them very public and extremely visible on the VS sites up-front! Then again, after linking with Amex in the first place, the person responsible for overlooking that detail was probably sacked after the first onslaught of nasty and angry complaints...