A few months ago I noticed that SCB was offering a pre-payed "credit" card (MC or Visa I think) that they advertised as "guaranteed" to work anywhere in the world, as "good as cash". This is different from a card that is secured by a fixed account deposit that you cannot touch (I have a two of these that have worked fine locally for years). I interpreted this to mean that if you are Denmark or Upper Volta or wherever then "approval' for a purchase is done locally -- they just check if you have that amount of funds still available on the card. It does not have to go back through the normal computer approval cycle. The "normal" cycle (like with the fixed-account secured cards) which goes back thorough the Thai bank and then to a MC/Visa clearing algorithm probably hosted in India. The "normal" approval cycle can fail because the charge (in, say, Upper Volta) is not consistent with your charging history as well as other reasons. At least this is my understanding. I am thinking that my next trip to the US next year I will get one of these pre-paid cards as a safety measure in case my other cards don't work.