In the EU, Russians are no longer accepting for payment their bank cards issued abroad. As the VPost project found out , car rental companies in Italy and Germany began to require documents confirming the right to legally stay in the country whose bank issued the card.
In particular, a tourist from Moscow said that he encountered these requirements when he tried to rent a car from Budget at Milan airport with a Visa card, which he issued in Kazakhstan:
“The manager said that now because of this, there are problems with all Russian clients. And he scared me that, according to their information, these requirements will be introduced in many trade and service organizations of the EU.”
Another Russian citizen was unable to rent a car from Budget with a Bank of Armenia card at Dortmund Airport. Another tourist from Russia was asked to confirm her residency in Belarus, where she received a card, while trying to rent a car in Rome from Firefly:
“They apologized and said that this was not their initiative, but the new requirements of the European Union,” says a VPost interlocutor.
As noted by VPost, all three cases occurred in March.