What is “Rumbo”?

It is a way of getting a discount from particular flight ticket sellers when you pay with particular types of both debit and credit cards. Standardly, you can get a 10-40 EUR discount. As far as very cheap air tickets are concerned, prices can get as low as several Euro cents for a ticket.

How It Works and Where

It is a certain way of promotion when the seller prefers paying with particular types of cards and offers tickets at discounted prices if you use them. You can use this system usually on buying a ticket from Ryanair, and other low-cost companies. If you have bought Wizzair or Voloea memberships, you can’t apply their membership discount, unfortunately.

The list of sellers providing this kind of discount is quite long. First, we need to mention Rumbo.esafter which gave its name to this process. Other servers are eDreams.es, lastminute.es, bravofly.es, Jetcost.es, but also their variations, such as .fr or .pt. Also, try out viajar.com

The list of cards for which the mentioned servers provide discounts is quite long and different servers use different cards. To confuse it even more, it all changes in the course of time. Sometimes you can get a discount if you pay with the Debit Mastercard, but it doesn’t happen too often. Usually, you can get a discount with Diners Club or Maestro cards. You can also encounter discounts when you pay with prepaid credit cards such as Viabuy and EntroPay.

A Few Examples

Now, let’s have a look at a few examples. The example no. 1: We want two return flight tickets from Prague to Naples. At the Easyjet website we look up tickets with departure dates from 4th to 6th of February and change the currency to EUR so that we could have a better comparison – EUR 106.14 per person.

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Now, let’s do something with the price. We visit rumbo.es and look up return flight PRG – NAP entering the same dates. The price changes rapidly, depending on which type of credit card you enter. You can get the best price with Maestro; please note the line saying „descuento co Maestro,“ which is a discount you get when you pay with Maestro Card. The resulting price for 2 tickets is EUR 75.

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Another example is a return ticket from Prague to Eindhoven with Transavia. On their website, the tickets with departure dates from 9th to 13th of February cost 50 EUR with a transaction fee of 10 EUR. You could buy those tickets through eDreams.ptfor 35 EUR only, if you use Viapay. With Maestro Card, you could get them for 29 EUR on rumbo.es. It’s less than a half of the original price.

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What complications could potentially arise?

You buy tickets on Spanish, French, or Portugal websites. If there will be any problems with a purchased ticket, you will have to communicate with the seller in their language – forget about English right away. If you don’t get a discount using your credit cards, I don’t recommend to buy tickets via these websites at all. In most cases, the prices are remarkably higher than elsewhere. Try to search through, for example, Kayak.com, there may be the same flight for a better price.

It could happen that if you use one card repeatedly, they may block it and you will never be able to get a discount with that particular card. In sellers’ conditions, there is usually a clause that you can get a discount for a given combination of name, card number and e-mail address just once in three months. But you can use this trick. With each payment, change the owner’s name and an e-mail address. That could enable you to buy more discounted air tickets.