Uk bank helpline charges from abroad

[reamo]

Hi, I am currently travelling France and have encountered the problem of my credit card freezing - my bank back in the UK (Lloyds tsb) is disallowing transactions. I have the emergency abroad helpline but my french phone is all but out of credit. How can I contact my bank without the charges? Reverse charge? If so, how?

thanks for any advice

[sitges]

I am not sure about the British banks, but I know that if you are traveling from the US to Europe, you need to give your bank your itinerary so that when the charges go through they know that you are there. If you want to contact you bank, you can do so by going to a cyber cafe or anyplace you can get computer access and send a message to them by e-mail. They can usually fix the problem within a few hours. Most bank sites have a contact us section on their home page.

[KARL]

If your card is Barclaycard then they do freeze unless you advise in advance of travel abroad and to which county/countries, others are very possibly similar but not all. My advice would be to buy a phone card (some call it calling card, e.g. Americans), a pre-paid card which allows you to phone landline to landline using an intermediary number (see instructions with the card). Before you buy, do a comparison on minutes per euro for calls to the UK (they vary considerably), then have a landline number handy so that in case you run out of credit you can at the start of the conversation give them this and ask them to call you back - do not use a mobile phone which is usually the most expensive way to call. An alternative to this is Skype, if you have access to the internet you can usually set up your own account if you don't already have one - but you need to have a microphone and headphone/speaker set up (ideally a headset) then you can do this in relative privacy (depending on where you get internet access). But how to pay may be a problem because you need to have plastic to register when opening the account - if interested try it and see what you can achieve (I am unsure whether they may even do direct debit into bank accounts).

[dzug2]

You might (and it's only might) be able to do the transaction over the counter in a bank. They will do the phoning if it's needed.