Hotel and car hire holds — has anyone got a no-KYC card to survive one?

I travel perhaps five or six times a year, and on every trip the same two things defeat me: the hotel pre-authorisation at check-in and the car hire deposit.

Both of them place a hold rather than a charge; the hotel typically wants the room rate plus a hundred or two for incidentals, and the hire company has asked for anything between £250 and £1,200 depending on the vehicle. The hold sits for the duration and is released some days after. My difficulty is that every card I have used for this is either declined outright at the counter or accepted and then found to have the full held amount frozen, which leaves me unable to spend on it for the rest of the trip.

What I would like to know is whether anyone here has genuinely completed a check-in and a hire collection on a card that did not require identity verification. I am not asking whether it should work in theory; I am asking whether anyone has stood at a desk and had it work.

I accept that a physical card may be a hard requirement here. If that rules out most of the category then that is a useful answer in itself.

hire desks require a physical card in the driver's name. not the card network's rule, theirs. no virtual card and no card without a name on it gets past that, ever

That is blunt but I suspect correct. Does the same apply to hotels, in your experience?

hotels are softer. plenty will take a card on file at booking and never ask at the desk. depends entirely on the chain

Hotels: yes, I have done this and it works, with one condition. Book online with the card, prepay the room, and the desk hold either doesn't happen or drops to an incidentals figure of fifty to a hundred. I have checked into three hotels in the last year on a card with no name verification behind it and only one placed a hold at all.

Car hire: no, and I don't believe anyone here will say otherwise honestly. Grindstone has it right — it is a rental company policy, enforced by a human reading the embossed name against a driving licence.

On the frozen-balance part of your question, that is the real trap and it is not card-specific. A hold of £1,200 removes £1,200 of spendable balance whatever the card, and on a prepaid product with no credit line behind it there is nothing to absorb it. The cards with a genuine credit mode — Nexo in credit mode, for instance — behave differently because the hold sits against a line rather than your money, but that is full KYC and a platform relationship.

PayPaw is the only one in the no-KYC group that issues physical at all, and physical solves presentation, not the name check. So even there you are back to the same wall.

Realistically: prepay hotels online with the no-KYC card, and keep one verified card for hire desks. Splitting the problem is cheaper than solving it.

Prepay the room. So simple and I've never once done it.

prepay always. learned that one the hard way

Had this exact thing in Lisbon two years back - hire desk, card came out, girl behind the counter looked at it for about four seconds and said no. Not declined, she just wouldn't run it. Ended up paying for a taxi transfer for the week and it worked out cheaper than the hire would have been anyway.

The bit I'd add to what's above: some of the hire outfits will take a debit card if you buy their own insurance product, because the deposit drops to almost nothing. It costs more than the excess would have and it's an obvious upsell, but it's the one route I've seen work for people without a proper credit card. Have you priced that against just not hiring?

Three check-ins with one hold is n=3. It's a useful anecdote and you flagged it as one, but the next person will quote it as "hotels are fine" and then get stuck in a lobby in a city they don't know.

Agreed. Prepay and carry a backup. That's the whole advice.

Worth noticing what you are actually asking for. A hotel check-in and a hire collection both put you physically in a room with your face, your document, and your payment instrument at the same moment.

There is no card that makes that anonymous. The card is the least identifying thing on the counter. If the reason you want no KYC is privacy, this particular transaction has already spent it before the card comes out of your wallet.

If the reason is simply that you don't want to hold a bank account, that's a different problem and it has the answer hana_v gave.

It is the second reason, and that is a fair distinction to draw; I had not separated the two clearly in my own head.

I shall do as suggested — prepay accommodation and stop trying to make the hire desk work. I will leave this unsolved because nobody has actually answered the question I asked, which is presumably because the answer is no.