I’ve been trying to get a Fuji Excursion from Shinjuku to Kawaguchiko. Ive done everything right, but can’t seem to get past the payment section. I’ve used the card I’ve saved, but it said ” **The credit card you entered could not be validated. Please check your credit card information or enter a different credit card.** ” .
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Did it manually, but said it was not accepted. Tried different cards, once again got the could not be validated message. The furthest I went was a Capitol One Visa where it asked me to type in the code it sent to my phone. Even after getting the number by text and typing the correct code, it gave me the same ” **The credit card you entered could not be validated. Please check your credit card information or enter a different credit card.** ” I did it multiple times, but I couldn’t get past this.
I contacted JR East for it and they said it should work, however I tried again with the same results. I’m just wondering if anyone else is having trouble with booking on the JR East reservation site?
2 comments
Do you have a card that isn’t a Visa? I’ve been seeing reports all around the internet of Visa having problems when reloading suica and processing online payments for Japanese sites. Possibly not the issue, but it’s worth ruling it out. There’s even a long thread in the stickied discussion post about it in regard to Disney tickets right now.
What time period have you tried this in? It’s probably worth waiting a few hours or a day between attempts, just to make sure it’s not an issue on their end (even if they said it wasn’t).
Are you sure your card isn’t blocking the transaction? Chase is usually good, but they sometimes block me randomly in foreign countries or otherwise have transaction issues. Happened yesterday at Anello in Tokyo, in fact.
Edit to add: I have to buy the same tickets for next week, so maybe I’ll go ahead and do it today to see if it works.
Here’s an article on what’s going on:
https://thepointsguy.com/guide/3d-credit-card-security/
Here’s a reddit post with even more detail:
https://www.reddit.com/r/japanlife/comments/xhc8ym/figured_out_why_foreign_visa_cards_do_not_work_to/
Tl;dr Foreign cards, especially US, are moving to a new 3d Secure protocol for card verification. They told vendors “Hey here’s the new standard, update to it because we’re going to begin to reject the old standard, then just flat out fully reject in Oct 2022.” Countless vendors around the world did not heed the warning, and a _lot_ of Japanese vendors are among them.
For singular transactions, if you’re willing to stay on the phone with your confused bank long enough, you can call to try to get them to pre-emptively verify the transaction on your end. Since this is a singular transaction, it should work.