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AIR BP fuel card

Patrick wrote:

I don’t get it though – does anyone understand what the point is? How does it matter to them? Shouldn’t they be happy to sell fuel – period?

Presumably fraud prevention. Obviously if you use the automated dispensers it reads the reg off the card but can’t check the aircraft.

EGTK Oxford

IME the machine asks you to enter the reg. Does it get it off the card as well?

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Perhaps the reg isn’t shown on the card, and you need to enter the reg on the terminal.

That way if the card is lost, someone else can’t use it, without knowing the reg of the aircraft that it was attached to?

Not particularly secure, but better than nothing.

Just a guess…..

EIWT Weston, Ireland

For my club’s BP card, you have to enter a PIN, which makes more sense for fraud prevention than an aircraft reg, which should be much easier to find out.

My reg is embossed on the card so anybody finding the card merely needs to enter the same reg into the machine

The “security” would exist only with a pump attendant who would presumably refuse to do it. But at self service pumps there can be no security – unless they operate some sort of algorithm based on the tank capacity of the said aircraft or something based on location. The credit card companies operate location based algorithms so if you get a purchase in London and 1 hr later one in Hong Kong…

AIR BP is virtually impossible to communicate with meaningfully. Their UK call centre is just a bunch of people who don’t know the answer to anything and their email comms are the same.

I recommend everyone going around Europe to get an AIR BP card because this company is busy stitching up the whole business, and in the process blocking Visa/Mastercard where they can.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

JasonC wrote:

Presumably fraud prevention

What’s the fraud cause here? If I get fuel for another aircraft, how is this bad for BP?

Surely it can’t be to prevent fraud in the sense of “someone finds the card and uses it to get fuel and let you pay for it”. Every other card in the world uses a PIN code for that – and rightly so. Also, as has been pointed out, at an automated dispenser, the AC reg. embedded with the card has to effect to prevent that sort of fraud.

Hungriger Wolf (EDHF), Germany

AFAIK, in the bizjet world, these fuel cards can be used to pay for other stuff apart from fuel, and there is a “history” of this capability being misused for “other expenses”

So, specially for us little people, they like to protect us from this problem

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

AFAIK, in the bizjet world, these fuel cards can be used to pay for other stuff apart from fuel, and there is a “history” of this capability being misused for “other expenses”

Ok – even that is none of AirBP’s business, though, is it? If they get more sales through the card, good for them?

It should be optional for companies that wish to have cards for individual aircraft (like it used to be the case) – but it can’t be the reason why AirBP took the “generic” cards off the market altogether.

Hungriger Wolf (EDHF), Germany

So this has been something of a saga – thankfully now resolved.

I am a freelance pilot and fly all sorts of different aircraft from piston twins through King Airs to Citations / CJs.

For several years I had two Air BP cards – one for Avgas and another for JET A1, both were marked ‘ANY’ so far as the registration was concerned and could be used to fuel up ANY aircraft. The majority of airports that I fly to accept AIR BP and in my own small way, was a fairly good Air BP customer.

Then suddenly, out of the blue (maybe a couple of years ago?), I got a letter advising that Air BP had a new policy whereby to ‘prevent misfuelling’ all ‘ANY’ reg. cards were to be withdrawn and that anyone needing to fly multiple aircraft would need to request a fuel release for each uplift at each location using an email template which they supplied.

Unfortunately the department which issues fuel releases is a disaster, sometimes taking a couple of days and much chasing to obtain. It was WAY more effort than it was worth, so I gave up on Air BP.

One day I got a call from Suzanne Rayner my ‘account manager’ asking why I had stopped using my account. I explained that the system for requesting a fuel release was not really workable and that since the demise of my ‘ANY’ cards, Air BP simply wasn’t feasible for me.

Suzanne hadn’t realised that this might be an issue for some people and she promised to see what she could do. About a week later, she called me back to say that a special case could be made for me and new, ‘ANY’ cards turned up. Now I’m using my Air BP account again :)

EGNS, EGKB, EGCV, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

AFAIK, in the bizjet world, these fuel cards can be used to pay for other stuff apart from fuel, and there is a “history” of this capability being misused for “other expenses”

That isn’t true of AirBP to my knowledge but other cards such as UVAir are certainly able to do this to cover handling and other airport charges. I don’t think having the reg on the cards does anything to prevent abuse of that.

EGTK Oxford
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