Has anybody else had difficulty in getting cash from machines of some banks labelled as 'free'?
Examples are ATM's of Alliance & Leicester and Abbey. When I go to these with my NatWest Maestro card, after all the rigmarole with inputting PIN etc, all of which seems OK, the machine eventually decides the service is 'temporarily unavailable' or 'transaction declined by issuer'.
The machines are not out of cash (because other customers go to them and evidently get some) and the card then works perfectly OK with other banks' machines (HSBC, Woolwich, Barclays). It has happened a little too often to be just a short term comms glitch.
I suspect the problem may be down to NatWest not wanting to pay transfer charges to some operators, but if this is the case do they not have a responsibility to advise their customers precisely which banks' ATM's will and will not honour their cards?