Jun 29, 2022 - 8:46 AM
Hi again Larry,
SBB sometimes applies a CHF 10 cancellation fee. They should not do that for Swiss Travel Passes, but this goes wrong from time to time. You got that refunded though.
As for the remaining €28.24: HappyRail describes that in their mail as "transaction costs of HappyRail itself". That is not what it is. I double checked with them, and they do not take a fee for themselves. What it actually is, is transaction costs by your bank. If you paid HappyRail in Swiss francs, they will refund that exact amount, in Swiss francs. If you bank account is in Euro's, your bank will take a free, or likely two (that's how my bank works): a fee because of the international transaction, and a "hidden" fee because they apply an inflated exchange rate in their favor. This is one of the reasons I often use Wise for international payments: www.myswissalps.com/swissfranc. They also take fees, but much less and it's more transparent.
If you dig into the details of the transaction, you should be able to see the original amount(s) in CHF transferred to you, and how that converts in less Euro's than you may expect. Your bank can help you with that if you can't find it. We've had questions about this before and it always comes down to banking fees.
Note that many web shops allow you to pick the currency you'd like to pay with. In the upper right corner of https://www.happyrail.com you'll see a dropdown list where you can pick EUR, for example. That makes the transaction more transparent if your bank account is in EUR. You still have to pay attention, as it then depends on the web shop how they convert prices. HappyRail does a pretty fair job there usually, but not all web shops do.
I hope this solves the mystery of the missing money!
Last modified on Jun 29, 2022 - 8:54 AM by Arno