---
title: Booking a hotel or flight? Your card might hesitate
description: Booking a hotel or flight? Your card might hesitate
---

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# Booking a hotel or flight? Your card might hesitate

|  | swype |
| --- | --- |

 

| SPENDING & ACCEPTANCE  •  KNOWN ISSUES ## Will my card work for booking a hotel or flight? Probably — but there's no guarantee with certain merchants. Here's why, and which ones to expect trouble with. |  |
| --- | --- |

| READING TIME 2 minutes | LEVEL Basic | YOU'LL NEED Nothing |
| --- | --- | --- |

**Short answer:** no card — including Swype — can guarantee 100% acceptance everywhere. Whether a specific merchant accepts a prepaid card is up to that merchant, not us. A handful of merchant types are known to be hit-or-miss.

| ① | ### Why some merchants are inconsistent |
| --- | --- |

 Some merchants don't accept prepaid cards at all, or only accept them under certain conditions. A common reason: some businesses don't know the final charge amount upfront, so they place a temporary hold for more than the actual cost — and prepaid cards don't always behave well with that.

Merchants known to be inconsistent

| ●  ChatGPT subscriptions ●  OpenAI API usage ●  Google, Facebook & TikTok Ads ●  Hetzner | ●  Flight tickets ●  Hotels ●  Car rentals |
| --- | --- |

| ② | ### Why hotels, flights, and rental cars specifically |
| --- | --- |

 These merchants typically don't know your final bill when you book — extra nights, fuel charges, or incidentals can change the total. So they place a hold for more than the booking price, and that hold can take up to 7 days to release after the final amount is confirmed. If your available balance doesn't comfortably cover a hold above the listed price, the transaction can be declined even though you technically have enough for the booking itself.

**Good to know:** if a card is declined at an unattended machine like a gas pump, paying inside with the cashier instead often works — the pre-authorization amounts can differ between the two.

Running into a decline somewhere else?

Tell us the merchant and we'll see if it's a known issue.

[Contact Support →](https://dashboard.swype.cards/help/raise-ticket)

 

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