Spent 4 hours trying to book a bus in Peru because the website only took local cards

I was in Cusco trying to get to Lima and every single bus company site kept rejecting my Visa. Ended up walking to 5 different terminals just to find a face to face ticket that was double the online price. Has anyone found a workaround for this without using sketchy third party sites?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_mia22d ago

I used to think these kind of posts were just people not trying hard enough, but then I spent three days in Santiago trying to pay for a hostel online that only accepted Chilean debit cards. It was a total nightmare. I had to ask a random guy at a cafe if I could use his card and pay him cash, which felt super sketchy but worked. For Peru specifically, I found that some of the smaller terminal ticket offices would take a foreign card if you called them directly, but it took forever to find the right person who spoke English. Honestly, stuff like this makes me wish the whole payment system was just one thing everywhere, because these local card only sites are a real pain when you're on the road.

the_sean22d ago

Some things you just have to learn the hard way.