American Express customer in a small village? Lloyds TSB might have just the answer

It was my wife's birthday this last weekend, so as a special treat, I arranged a romantic getaway, just for the two of us, without the kids. On the way to our weekend destination, we stopped for lunch at a rural 'gastropub', a very nice place with some excellent if slightly exotic dishes (haggis cottage pie anyone?). At the end of our lunch, I wanted to pay with American Express. Now, I do have a few cards in my wallet, but my Amex card collects points with Nectar, one of the UK loyalty schemes, so I quite like using it when I can. However, the owner of the place who came to collect my payment said, "I am sorry sir, we don't take Amex. They still charge us for taking their cards". The fact he wasn't accepting Amex was not too surprising - while the gap is narrowing, there are still quite a few more places accepting Visa or MasterCard than American Express, especially among the smaller merchants. What I did find interesting was the phrase "they still charge us", as if it was something unique in the market. I challenged that he surely got charged by his acquirer for accepting other cards as well, but he said it was a lot less, and generally sounded as if he has fully accepted that charge as a cost of doing business. Given the occassion, I wasn't in the mood for an impromptu market research on MSC rates across different schemes, so I just simply paid the bill with my Visa. Lloyds TSB, one of the top UK banks, have an interesting solution for situations such as this - Airmiles Duo Credit Card. Anyone signing up for this card gets in fact two cards - one American Express and one MasterCard. What's interesting is that the rewards the customer gets from spending on Amex is five times better than the ones on the spend through MasterCard. In other words, the customer is incentivised to use his/ her Amex card wherever it is accepted, yet they have a MasterCard as a fall-back option in those places where it's not. Both cards are linked to the same account, one credit limit and one statement. And both cards do earn rewards, albeit it at different rates. I might have to consider getting one myself next time.