Hi Concord,
Coincidentally, I just called AMEX, Chase, and Citi today to find out if any of them have a 'chip and pin' option. AMEX does not have this technology in the USA yet. Chase has it available on the JP Morgan Palladium card but it has a $595 annual fee and you cannot product change to it. 
At any rate, I will be doing extensive european travel in the next 6 months and needed an answer on what to do. I had a lot of problems in Denmark and Germany and took 30-45 minutes to resolve at some retail stores and restaurants each instance. The PIN on most cards for cash advances obviously doesn't work since that is for ATM machines, trust me I tried.
I called Citi today and to my surprise, they were able to accomodate my Thank You Premiere Preferred with chip and pin technology. Of course, they call it Global Chip at Citi, why wouldn't they? They mentioned you can only have either the paypass payment tag (for your keyring) or the chip technology on the card with pin. I asked them if this will put a metal chip on the front of my card and assign a pin and the rep said yes. It's only available on certain high-end cards and not everyone is eligible. The rep said generally people that have traveled in Europe often enough (6-10 times a year at a minimum - which I have/do) will be eligible. They said I'll receive it within 5-7 business days. We will see. Unfortunately, there is only a press release on it via the Citi website and they stress it's for Corporate customers. However, this rep said I was eligible and they will be sending it out. I will post a picture when it is here and provide an update. I was pretty excited. I forgot to ask whether there is a foreign transaction fee with this. He also mentioned that the Citi AA Executive card has the chip and pin technology standard, but that is a hefty annual fee similar to AMEX Platinum and JP Morgan Palladium by Chase. No benefit/perk changes were made to my account.
Hope this helps.
As a frequent international traveller and expat I haven't seen anywhere not accept a magnetic swipe to be honest, while chip-n-pin is not established in the states, most of Europe have been using it for years yet I have used many of my non chip-n-pin cards exclusively across europe without any issues, thus my chip-n-pin Barclaycard hardly ever gets used.
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@MS00000000 wrote:
@CreditMuppet wrote:As a frequent international traveller and expat I haven't seen anywhere not accept a magnetic swipe to be honest, while chip-n-pin is not established in the states, most of Europe have been using it for years yet I have used many of my non chip-n-pin cards exclusively across europe without any issues, thus my chip-n-pin Barclaycard hardly ever gets used.
Sorry to hijack the thread a bit, but at these chip+PIN kiosks, do they work with just a chip or do they require the PIN also? I can see a merchant accepting the chip+signature since you're standing in front of them, but I was thinking train station ticket kiosk at 3am with no attendant.
To answer your question most kiosk machines that I have used (ie underground at heathrow) can do either chip-n-pin (pin required but no signature) or will allow you to use a regular magnetic credit card (ATM style), in all cases the PIN is required as that is the main security feature of chip-n-pin. In most stores you will simply put your card in the credit card machine and it will prompt you for your pin, and in resturants most use a portable reader which you will slide you card in to and it will request your PIN, after you enter it it will print out the transaction reciept for you to sign (those same portables have a magnetic card reader which will allow swipe!).
It's probably also worth mentioned that although some merchants may think they can not take a magnetic card, most almost exclusively can and they just have to ask another member of staff about it, in most major cities such as Paris or London you shouldnt have any issue at all.