Fuel Card recommendations
 

Can anyone please recommend the Fuel cards worth having for flying as a private pilot in Australia? I currently use an Air BP carnet but want to fly to locations not necessarily serviced by Air BP.

Thanks and Regards

I've been a little out of the loops for a couple of years now but it seemed like a lot of Bowsers were upgrading to be able to just use any Credit Card and slowly moving away from Carnet style cards?

Standard credit card and Air BP as a backup should do it.

As above but some places in Queensland only use Viva

Thank you for your responses. At certain aerodromes such as YGEL the Ersa specifies that World Fuel Services is the avgas provider. Are they likely to just accept a credit card and is this what is normally the case with other providers? I would naturally ring ahead for specific locations but just wondering what the norm is.

Yes they are.

As a matter of interest, you say you have an Air BP carnet card. Did BP require you to provide financial security for that card?

I actually make use of a flying club members card, so it isn’t a card in my name.

Try Skyfuel. They’ll send you a skyfuel card, BP card and World fuel services card. Bring your credit along on the trip and you’re pretty much covered for anywhere you’d go.

Check out SkyFuel's Carnet scheme. They issue you 3 x carnet cards, BP/Mobil/Their Own for your use, they pay the invoice from BP and then invoice you so you don't need to provide a $50,000 surety on top of your first-born, to Air BP just to put 83L in your Jodel at Upper Bumphuck.

If anyone’s got a BP card out of Skyfuel in the last few years, please let me know.

We got a Air BP and World Fuels for ours in Jan 2019 but they wouldn't send us a Skyfuel one as we weren't in NSW so "wouldn't use it and didn't need it" according to them. We did have to provide a $500 deposit and a credit card as back up though.

Did you apply for your cards as a private aircraft owner or as a club or similar organisation? I wrote directly to Air BP about three years ago asking for a card and offered to allow them to lock up $10,000 on my credit card. They have yet to reply.

Skyfuel are the only company really looking after GA in Australia.

Applied as a Pty Ltd company which was a small syndicate

Skyfuel is not the only player looking after GA.
IOR has quite a few sites now and growing.

Thanks for your response, gav_20022002.

Clinton, I got a BP card late last year. ACN and direct debit, no CC o deposit needed. Sounds like it varies PatrickF

Oi Patrick, how long did it take to come through? I applied a while back, waiting.

Thanks Patrick. I’ll give it another go.

And the final mystery: I am baffled why Air BP bowsers don’t accept credit cards, like all of the other AVGAS bowsers of which I’m aware.

Clinton, it goes back to at least as early as 1986 when the company I was marketing manager for was developing the first australian multi product fuel pumps and card controlled pumps.

The problem with card activated bowsers and pumps is legal, not technical.

‘(1)Simply put, your bank and credit card balances are private confidential information, protected by law. Hackers would love your details.

(2)‘They petrol station (bowser) operator doesn’t give credit.

(3). You want fuel, but the bowser doesn’t know how much you are going to take and the bank is prohibited by privacy laws from “telling” electronically, the bowser what your bank balance, credit card balance and credit limit are. Furthermore, the bowser can’t take back the fuel you’ve just loaded or detain you and call the police. Forget about real time internet access for authorising every litre in advance.

This creates a commercial problem. It is compounded by the fact that the bowser may not be online. The dangerous solution to that is to download everybody’s credit card status, details and limits to the bowser once or twice a day. That creates another privacy and security problem.

I forget how we solved it, but it was a risk sharing solution, not a technical one, that satisfied the law. I’m not sure what the current solution is, but I would guess BP doesn’t have the smarts in its bowsers or the back room systems to easily take credit cards yet.

Thanks Sunfish.

That would explain why, when I use a credit card rather than a ‘carnet’ card, the bowser requests a ‘pre-authorised’ amount and a PIN, and there’s a bit of a delay while the machine has a discussion over the electric interweb with my bank. The process seems to be one through which the bowser checks whether your credit card limit covers the cost of what you say you’re going to buy.

(I recently battled with a bowser that had a very aged and dim LED display, and was surprised to see a ‘pop up’ on my phone from my online banking app, saying I’d spent $3,000 on AVGAS, my having hit the zero one too many times on the bowser keypad. Fortunately the actual final debit reflected the very modest amount of AVGAS that I actually put in my very modest aircraft.)

Suppliers other than Air BP seem to have dealt with this issue.

Liability. They don't want you accidentally loading Jet A into your Bonza or RV. They issue Jet A cards or Avgas cards. When asked why the other companies take credit card: Don't care, that's their business, we do what we do.