Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

auronrenouille

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 23, 2011
16
1
Hi all,

So, I'm traveling to Japan in a few weeks. I'm already super familiar with express transit cards because I use them in SF and LA. This means that I'm going to have a Suica card set as my express transit card, and I'll also have my Chase card in Apple Pay. In the US, transit cards and bank cards would almost never conflict.

Cue SpongeBob meme, "A few weeks later..."

In Japan it has become not uncommon for stores to accept IC cards such as Suica as a payment method. So let's say that I go to a vending machine, or a store that accepts both bank cards and IC cards; when I tap my watch, what will happen next? Will the watch just pick the most recently added card? The most recently used?

And should I just embrace it, use Suica for purchases when available? After all, it looks like my bank processed the first ¥1,000 that I put on the card with a respectable exchange rate and w/o fees, despite the fact that I use a Chase debit card, which I had thought had a 3% foreign transaction fee.

The tl;dr - if my Apple Watch wallet has both an express transit card and a bank card, and I'm paying at the register at a store that accepts both the express transit card and the check card via Apple Pay as valid means of payment, what will happen next?
 
I’m often in Japan and my experience is that I actively have to select my Suica card if I want to pay with that in stores. Otherwise ApplePay just uses my standard card.

I’m Danish with a regular Visa card as my primary card.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.