Whenever we have to pay for something we have to decide whether to use a credit card or cash. (And by credit card I mean Apple Pay using my phone.) Almost all the time we choose credit card for several reasons. (1) It is fast and easy and you don’t have to worry about change and putting it away. (2) We have a record of the payment which is useful for post-trip spending analysis. (3) It still seems kind of magical, you just double click and then tap and you’re done. It gives me a little thrill.

We don’t use a card in bars unless the bill is over $15 and we don’t use it for small vendors who will have to foot the swipe fees.

The downsides of a card are the swipe fees that the card networks charge the vendors. These are at least 2% and often more. Apple Pay gives us a 2% rebate on each charge so maybe the fees are more than that. We don’t pay the fee, the seller does but we feel bad about imposing the fee on them for our convenience. (Maybe not that bad since we almost always do it.)

Some places don’t take cards. We had a €15 menu at one place and he said they don’t take cards for paying for the menu, presumably because the menus are already a really good deal that they probably don’t make that much on. But I assume that a seller would lose some sales if they didn’t take cards.

This is a typical big tech tactic, give the benefits to the decision maker and make the other party pay the fees. Amazon does that. They give benefits to sellers to draw them in and then buyers to draw them in and then start taking most of the benefits for themselves. A process Cory Doctorow famously called “enshittification” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification)

One reason paying with a card is so easy is that everyone has these little devices where they enter the amount and you tap it with your card or phone and bang!, it’s done. We learned on this trip that those devices are rented for €24 a month. This is a trivial cost for a restaurant that uses it hundreds of times a day for fairly large charges. But for a small hotel with a few rooms it is more of a burden. The woman who told us about the fee ran a small place and only had two groups that day.

When we reserve a hotel we always used to call the place. This was a little harder in Spain because, despite Wynette’s facility with Spanish it is harder to talk on the phone. Because of this and because lots of people don’t speak any Spanish, booking.com has become the de facto standard for making reservations in Spain. The same hotel owner told us that booking.com takes a 15% fee. So if you use booking.com to make the reservation and then pay with a card the hotel pays at least a 17% fee and probably more.

We try to call but these days it can be hard to get a hold of a small hotel on the phone, they just don’t answer. That brings us to WhatsApp which is the message service that is a de facto standard in Spain. We have made reservations through WhatsApp but it is often hard to get their WhatsApp number.

One final anecdote about booking.com. We called a hotel, they actually answered and said they were full, the dreaded completo. We had found the hotel using booking.com which said there were rooms available. So we went back to booking.com and got a room at the same hotel. All we can figure is that she released some rooms to booking.com and, even though they were not yet reserved, she was not allowed to rent them herself. We found it quite mysterious.