It is widely known that pending transactions are charges which have been authorized but the merchant has not yet submitted the actual charges for processing. Even though this merchant has not yet submitted the actual charges, a credit limit is automatically reduced by the amount of that pending transaction. I have a HSBC Mastercard with a $4500 limit - on which recently I charged two airline tickets. According to the transaction history the charges already went through. But in the pending transactions figure still shows it as pending, and artificially reduces my credit limit. Question: Why does the CC company still show this as a pending transaction even though the charges already went through, and posted?
Sometimes they'll run the charge as pending and then resubmit the charge and not match it to the pending charge. The pending charge usually drops off after about a week if nothing comes through to match it up.
Exactly. They don't submit as finalizing a previously-authorized transaction, so it doesn't clear. Be glad it's not a debit card--you could have checks being returned because of that, with you being charged the appropriate NSF fee for each.
But as I stated in my first post - the transactions already went through, they are showing up as recent transactions - but they still show up as pending, artificially lowering my credit limit.
Yes... There are two ways to post the credit transactions: 1) get an authorization and then later sync up the final transaction with the earlier authorization 2) do those both in one step. what it sounds like is happening is they are getting an authorization for your charge to make your reservation and then once everything is lined up on their end, running your purchase separately. The net effect is your card is charged only for the purchase, but, as you point out, your available credit is reduced until they get it all sorted out. Becuase an unreconciled authorization vanishes automatically in a week or so, I doubt any one will do anything about it because even if they fussed around, it would still take that long for it to go away. Your only choice is to vote with your feet and buy your ticket elsewhere next time.
And it won't affect the balance that's reported to the credit bureaus, if you're worried about your ratios. They only report the balance, not pending transactions. As Bob said, it will go away on its own. Many hotels and car rentals do it, I'm not sure if you can really "vote with your feet" because the practice is very commonplace. Restaurants do the same thing when they give you the check. They have put through an authorization larger than the bill in case you put the tip on the bill. But restaurants have a short time between when they run the authorization and when they have the final number, so they're pretty good at just updating and finalizing the transaction. Hotels and car rentals, on the other hand, often process the actual transaction days later, when you check out or return the car. It's difficult to go back and find the original transaction, so they just run the final through and let the authorization drop off in the week or how ever many days it is until it falls off.
