Journal · 2026-05-30
Paying Half From a Card Issued Abroad
The deposit goes from home, in euros, from a card or account that usually lives in another currency, and a few practical points help it go through at once.
Paying half ahead is straightforward in principle. The figure is agreed in the thread, the details for paying appear there once the evening is fixed, and the payment is made. In practice, a traveller paying from abroad runs into small frictions that a local guest never meets, and knowing them in advance saves a day of back and forth.
The methods
Card is the usual route. Revolut and Wise are accepted for anyone who holds an account with either and prefers it. Cryptocurrency is accepted as well. Neither bank transfer nor PayPal is an option. Cash cannot be a deposit, because a deposit is settled before she sets out and cash only changes hands in the room. The deposit entry sets out why half is asked at all.
Euros, and what your bank does with them
Every figure is in euros. A deposit of EUR 180 for a two hour booking is EUR 180, and whatever that becomes in your own currency is decided by the bank or card issuer, at its own rate, with whatever fee it charges for a foreign transaction. Those fees are between you and your bank. Nothing is added on the house's side, and the figure written in the thread does not change because the card is foreign.
A traveller who pays in euros from a multi-currency account avoids the conversion altogether, which is one reason Revolut and Wise are popular for this. The figure leaves the account exactly as it was quoted.
When the card is declined
This happens more often with cards issued abroad than with local ones, and it is almost never a problem with the card itself. Banks watch for unusual foreign payments, and a first payment to a merchant in another country, weeks before a trip, can trip their fraud checks. The payment is stopped and the cardholder gets a message asking whether it was genuine.
The fix is to answer the bank's message, confirm the payment and try again. Some banks let you tell them about travel in advance, which prevents the problem entirely. If a card is stubborn, the alternative methods exist for exactly this reason, and switching to one of them is quicker than a long call to the bank.
Paying at the right moment
Pay only once the evening is agreed in the thread and the amount has been stated there. A deposit sent before the reply has confirmed who is free, or for a figure the thread has not yet named, only creates a correction to be made afterwards. The order is always the same: the evening is agreed, the amount and the details appear, the payment goes, and the confirmation follows. If you are paying from a different time zone, allow for the reply to your payment arriving during your night rather than your day, and do not read the gap as a problem.
After the deposit goes
Once the payment arrives, the house confirms the booking in writing. That confirmation is the moment the evening becomes yours, and until it arrives nothing is held. If a payment has left your account but no confirmation has appeared within a reasonable time, say so in the thread; payments from abroad sometimes take longer to settle, and the house will tell you what it can see.
The other half
The balance is paid on arrival, at the figure agreed in the thread. Cash in euros is the plain option. Cash in another major currency is accepted too, provided the exact sum in that currency was confirmed to you in writing before she set out. A traveller who arrives with no euros at all can therefore bring the balance from home, as long as the sum in that currency has been agreed in the thread first.
If the deposit has to come back
A cancellation more than twenty-four hours before the booked time returns the whole deposit, and it returns by the route it came. A card payment goes back to the card; an account payment goes back to the account. Currency movements between the two dates are the bank's, not the house's, so a deposit paid in one month and returned in the next may be worth slightly more or slightly less in your own currency. The euro figure returned is the euro figure paid. The full scale is on the booking terms page, and the page on the deposit sent from home covers what it holds.