Albania: Where Cash Is Still King
Even for rent (surprise!)
We’ve stayed in a lot of properties around the world as we’ve traveled and we’ve paid for them all with a credit card, even in Argentina. Well, all but one. Imagine our surprise when we checked into our last property in Tirana, Albania, and were asked for cash by the host. I looked at Chris with a super confused face. Cash?
I had reserved the property via Booking.com and just assumed our card had been run as it had with every other property we had stayed in. Nope! It had not. Hmm. We had some cash on us since that’s how lots of things are paid for in Albania, but we hadn’t been prepared to pay for our accommodation in cash and didn’t have nearly enough. Not only that, but we had just been through an ordeal getting to the property (that’s a story for another day) and the last thing we wanted to do was figure out how to go back out and get cash.
So, I asked if we could pay via a digital method and, after some back and forth with language challenges, we were told we could pay via PayPal. Phew! Problem solved. Right?
Except, no. Because that would be too easy! When I tried to send the payment, I got this message:
Well, of course I contacted customer service. Actually, I ended up at the FAQs and discovered I needed to contact our bank, which is connected on the back end to PayPal. Unfortunately, it was after hours (because of the 9-hour time difference) and the weekend, so the call center representative said they’d leave a message for someone to call back within 24 hours. Oy.
In the end, I played a game of phone and email tag with the bank and never got anywhere. So we went to the ATM and took out the max amount of cash possible: 50,000 lek, or about USD$500. (Yep, that’s it. Some ATMs will let you take out more, but they were across town from where we were.) Of course, we needed to hold some of that back for ourselves for our own spending*. In the end, we had to take out batches of cash over several days to pay for the property in full. And this always required making a trek to an ATM, as the property we were in wasn’t near one (or much of anything, really). Fortunately, our host was flexible and allowed this. I mean, we truly didn’t have another option! No Zelle or Venmo (US bank accounts only). Wise isn’t present in Albania, nor is Revolut. It was a bit like stepping back in time.
*While we could pay with our card at many places in Tirana (supermarkets, restaurants, the mall), we had to pay for everything else in cash (taxi rides, local produce, and even the car we rented to go to Vlore).
In researching, we learned the following:
PayPal says it supports transactions in Albania, but it seems that if your transaction is going to someone with an Albanian bank tied to their PayPal account, it will be blocked. Whether that’s because of PayPal’s policy or your bank’s policy, I’m not clear. But I wasn’t the first American to discover this, as there were other posts about it in the expat group.
Booking.com does not, in fact, automatically process all reservations using your credit card. It’s ultimately up to the individual property using Booking.com as their platform. So while we’d always payed with our card before, there were times where we paid onsite with our card rather than through Booking itself. I just hadn’t mentally processed that we were doing that. The last property we booked in Tirana was the first individually owned property we’d reserved via Booking; all the others had been hotels. Lesson? Read the fine print about payment when making a reservation and, when in doubt, message the host ahead of time to confirm payment options.
Many people pay their rent in cash in Albania period. That’s just how it’s done. Old school? Definitely. To us, anyway. But in this case we were the ones with the lack of cultural understanding.
While paying in cash felt a world away from England (where we had just been) and Norway (where we are now), both of which are nearly cashless, it’s been fascinating to experience differences across the world. Do you have any interesting/funny stories about paying for properties as you’ve traveled?