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Visa transaction (money reduced from account) happened only after 16 days after I made purchase.

2017-10-01

Paid flight tickets. Money was deducted or reserved (haven't paid attention). When paid, I specified card number, name and code. payment system forced me to log to bank to make payment.

2017-10-11

10 days later, account was showing as there were no such transaction ever. My money were back on my account. Bank said that there were no transaction at all for that day (2017-10-01). Flight company said that transaction were successful, and I shouldn't worry. Other transactions looks correct. It may returned earlier, but 2017-10-11 is when I noticed it.

2017-10-17

Payment appears on my account as if I paid 2017-10-17.

Very frustrated now, as I don't understand how company could charge that much later after payment, and why bank is unable to see the transaction. My biggest worry, is that bank is not showing correct information in the log, and in this case, would it make sense to change bank?

Notes: I'm in Finland, card is Visa Debit Electron. It means that for most transactions by card number, I have to log to my bank, and validate it with additional codes. I already used tickets, and everything went smooth.

Probably related:

Ben Miller
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Konstantin Petrukhnov
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1 Answers1

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AIUI this is not terribly abnormal.

There are authorisations (sometimes reffered to as "pending charges" or "holds") and actual charges. An authorisation reserves money but doesn't actually take it.

Normally what happens when you pay by card is that the merchant gets an authorisation immediately. Then some time later the authorisation is converted into an actual charge when the merchant takes the money.

Sometimes merchants are slow in taking the actual charge, either deliberately (some merchants won't charge your card until they actually supply the goods to reduce the chance of having to process a refund) or because of administrative snarlups somewhere.

When this happens the authorisation can time out before the actual charge is taken. So you get the pattern you see, first the authorisation appears then it times out and dissapears and finally the actual charge shows up.

Peter Green
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