Is American Express widely accepted in UK?

I live in the UK and have both Amex and Visa cards. I prefer to use the Amex, because I get BA Avios with the card, so if I can use the card, I will. I'd looked for some concrete statistics for the country as a whole, but like pnuts, I found them hard to come by; it's possible they're considered commercially confidential. So I looked back over my budget book for the past two years, where essentially each purchase has a line item on the credit cards page.

In the same period, I have made 147 purchases on my Visa card, and 395 purchases on my Amex card. That suggests that 70-75% of the places I make card purchases accepted Amex.

This should be taken with a grain of salt for various reasons. It's just one person's data, and I live in Cambridge, which is a fairly affluent and touristy area; if I lived in somewhere less so, I would expect Amex acceptance rates to fall off. But two years of hard spending data (that's hard data on spending, not data on hard spending; I'm fairly tight-fisted) suggest that the traditional picture, that nearly noone in the UK takes Amex, is no longer true.

I would add one further caveat, which is that I have found that contactless acceptance of Amex is very poor; less than half the terminals I try (at retailers who take Amex) will process the card. But you can always get round that by going chip-and-PIN.

Of all the cards I have, AmEx is the least accepted - many shops just will not touch it. Those that do usually make an extra charge. Ten years ago it was a minor nuisance, but now up and down the country it is actually accepted in less of the places I would go to (shops, pubs, small hotels etc)

Larger hotel chains do tend to accept it, as do many restaurants, but Visa or MasterCard are a much safer bet. And London is slightly better than the rest of the country, but not much.

In Wales!

Cash is king.

Amex will be pointless. (It's not even ubiquitously accepted in London amongst smaller retailers). I'd even be hesitant to recommend MasterCard.

Even if places do take Amex, they'll hate you for it (because of the costs). If a place is running on 6% margins, then that's half their profit eaten away. Tip more generously if you use Amex.

(You'll be expected to tip better if you have an american accent, anyway -- especially with the GBP so weak against the USD right now).

And -- don't even bother embarrassing yourself if you haven't got a chip and PIN version.

I find Amex the least accepted card outside major stores.To be comfortable I would suggest you get yourself a Visa or Mastercard,both of which Are widely accepted.