I just read a thread where the comments heavily suggested OP use a credit card when they travel again so that it would be easier to dispute a fraudulent charge. What makes a dispute through your bank less successful?
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Both the laws and the contractual rules between credit cards and debit cards are very different. Technically both have a responsibility to help you dispute charges that are either fraudulent or otherwise inappropriate but there’s a couple key factors that make credit cards better. For starters it’s not your money. When you dispute a charge it usually goes on hold right away which means that no longer affects your ability to use the rest of your credit and shouldn’t be accruing interest. That also means that even if it takes a while to get to that point you aren’t sitting there with zero cash in your actual bank account to pay bills and do other things. So you don’t have to worry about missing your mortgage or your phone payment because somebody added an extra zero when running a hotel transaction or something
Then add to that, the fraud protection rules usually seem to give you more time to dispute credit cards. You have a longer amount of time looking backwards to spot a charge and raise it as a problem before they say it’s too late you should have already dealt with this earlier. That goes for both actual fraud where a charge never should have been placed and Merchant disputes where you didn’t get what you paid for.
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