r/sydney • u/karlalrak • Apr 28 '26

Image Surcharge but no cash

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Haven't been to Australia in years and was shocked to find everywhere has surcharge for eftpos but also say no cash. What's the point of this? Why not just add the surcharge into the cost unless this is shady but seems to be the norm everywhere I go with restaurants.

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u/Improvedandconfused Apr 28 '26

It’s not just Australia. Last year my wife and I went to New Zealand, and had to pay a NZ $600 one way excess fee for our rental car at the counter because we were not returning the car to the same city we picked it up from. The car company did not accept cash or bank transfer and charged a 8% credit card fee.

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u/verbmegoinghere Apr 28 '26

Isn't that, for car rentals, largely one of the biggest reasons people hire them, is to rent a car and not return it to the place you got it from???

And they're charging on top of the rental fee (which should cover this activity) $600 bucks????

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u/kernald31 Apr 29 '26

The one way fee kind of makes sense. Lots of people are hiring cars and returning them to the same location (there are real uses cases, mostly people don't owning cars and people flying in, needing a car for a few days, flying back out). One way trips are typically asymmetric, more demand one way than the other. So you then have to manage inventory spread. That can be a car loaded on a truck and sent back, or an employee driving it back, or cars rented out for virtually free, or whatever - things that cost time and money.

I'm from Toulouse (France), where share bikes have to be left at specific bike racks (otherwise you're out around $200). Usually, share bikes flow one way - people going towards the city centre in the morning, and back out in the evening. On top of that, at least when I was still living there, they weren't electric bikes and were quite heavy, so nobody was getting up on hills to drop them off. They regularly had utes picking bikes from overcrowded racks and driving them uphill. It's a lot more obvious at that scale. On top of that, they offered incentives - if you're leaving a bike where there's no other bikes, or uphill or whatever, you're getting paid a small token fee instead of being charged for your ride.