Since we seem to have moved on to more general advice, I would caution against using a credit card for cash withdrawals.
Most CCs start charging interest (at whatever usurious rate they impose) from day one of a cash withdrawal. I suspect that most Dopers clear their accounts every month, to avoid interest charges, so if you need cash, and in the UK at least you won’t need much, use a debit card. In fact, for a two or three-week stay, bring £100 with you and buy everything with your CC.
I couldn’t even find a place where I could pay cash for a cup of coffee in London.
The cash withdrawal is a real catch.
However if you cash the card up so it is in credit, and you don’t go negative, you don’t get hit.
The credit card companies structure the way they regard payments so that they get maximum interest from you.
The upshot is you may end up using two credit cards.
Or a debit card.
Just been conversing with a friend of mine who is currently visiting the UK. Chelsea Flower Show today. She is bemoaning the near cashless regime. Lots of places only take electronic money. Modern advice is really the opposite of what OP received. Cash is less and less useful. Make sure you have a solid electronic money structure in place with back.
For me that is chip and pin credit cards and Apple Pay. Near field touch-less systems provide useful insulation from a lot of low tech fraud and theft tactics. Swiping is to be avoided.
OTOH, the amount you can pay with tap (or Apple watch) has some limits - per transaction, and total daily. Be aware what they are. When abroad, I make sure I use an ATM that is built into a bank, not some freestanding small one in the corner of a business.
(Recall the story years ago about the fellow who built his own little ATM. He wheeled it into a mall and chained it to a pillar. I guess nobody questioned it. People tried to use it, but after putting in their card and entering their PIN, it spits out the card with “network error”. He went back and collected it a week later, full of magstripe data and associated PINs. Another scammer was caught because his girlfriend let him put a video camera in the ceiling of the shop she worked at, and a skimmer on the CC terminal.)
Definitely have more than one card in case something happens with one. Also, not sure what some card policies are - IIRC you are not responsible for tap purchases made after you report your card missing? Someone can do a lot of damage in a short time. Before Covid I used slice into the cards to disable the tap antenna. Keep safe the list of card number and emergency bank phone number for that card on a piece of paper.
There was a time when MasterCard was called “Access” in the UK for some reason; that could be part of the cause for confusion. (I recall that, pretty much coming out of customs at Heathrow in 1987, there was a large banner saying something like, “If you have a MasterCard, you have Access.”)
It was originally an independent British credit card that shared its network with Mastercard on the basis of a partnership agreement until it was subsequently acquired by Mastercard and the brand was retired. Very much the same as with Eurocard in continental Europe.
I know, just pointing out that Amex isn’t 100% here, either (and excluding cash only places). I was surprised it wasn’t accepted at a household name like Goodwill, a national charity shop.
Well, Amex fees are much higher than Visa or Mastercard. A lot of places won’t take it for that reason.
Last trip to Europe (6 months ago) I used Apple Pay almost exclusively. I liked never having to take my wallet out of its secure location. I had had mixed results using a PIN with a chip-and-sign card before, using the same cards on Apple Pay eliminated any problems.
Amex is, however, accepted by Oyster (the contactless payment system for public transport in London), which, in terms of number of transactions, makes up a huge chunk of payments in the UK.
Do all visa and MasterCards do free currency conversion?
I feel partly like conversion fees are a thing of the past but I also vaguely remember seeing a statement and noticing significant mark up on a transaction made abroad.
I recall taking a day ski trip back in the late 1980’s and the driver said “we take Visa and Mastercard, but not American Express”. I asked why, and he said the biggest problem was that unlike the other two, it tended to take several months to pay the merchant.
Visa used to be “Chargex” and IIRC Mastercard was “MasterCharge”. I gather the name “Visa” was chosen as more widely recognized and pronounced internationally…
Nope. I think it is more common in the US, in Canada most banks charge 2.5%. I have an Amazon Canada Mastercard which gives me back the 2.5% as Amazon credit.
No, but many do. One of mine does and the other doesn’t. I bring them both when i travel, to have a backup, but i only use the one that does free currency conversion.
And i said it above, but maybe it’s worth mentioning again. Most American credit cards don’t have a PIN by default (because we use signatures, instead) but you can often get one added to the card by asking for it, and that’s worth doing before traveling to Europe. Some places, especially vending machines, can’t process a card without a PIN. A weird side effect of my having don’t that is that some machines in the US all for my PIN. Which, honestly, makes it harder for someone to steal my card and buy gas with it, so i like that.
A further comment about PINs. You can request a PIN for your American card, but many such cards will only work for cash advances from an ATM, not for chip-and-pin purchases. If you really want that feature, it’s best to confirm with your bank that your card has it.
That said, I agree with other comments that chip-and-PIN isn’t really necessary any more. For a 3 week trip to the British Isles last fall, I had a BofA travel card in my wallet just in case the need arose. Didn’t need it once. Apple Pay and contactless cards were pretty much universal.
More specifically most currency conversions have a “buy” and “sell” rate, obviously different. For example, in a US trip earlier this month, my Visa (Royal Bank) used 1.403xxx as the exchange rate, working out to 71.27¢ to the Canadian dollar. The real exchange rate was about 73.1¢ so they were making a small cut of their own (about 2%) on each transaction.
But the same buy/sell logic applies with any bank or currency exchange. The ones at the airport have particularly horrendous spreads.
And if you have much larger (electronic) amounts to exchange, you can find far better deals.
And you didn’t exceed your limits paying for hotels and such? Or were those expenses all pre-paid/online?
IIRC, we used a mix of pre-paid and current charges. We have high enough limits on our cards that there was never a problem. The main thing is that we never needed to use a credit card PIN.
Also, possibly more related to the OP, we did withdraw a couple hundred pounds from an ATM early in the trip, just in case there was an occasion when we needed cash. We didn’t need it at all, and had to go out of our way to spend it toward the end of our trip. American Visa cards worked everywhere.
Sure but there is a difference in kind between these exchange rates and a discrete “foreign transaction fee”, this is what I was trying to get at. The exchange rates are normally not too painful, not for just going on holiday anyway.
It’s like the difference between paying in advance for cellular coverage abroad and being whacked with an unplanned roaming charge.
I am pretty sure Visa was an international conglomeration of cards, including BankAmeriCard in the USA and BarclayCard in the UK. No bonus points for guessing which two banks were behind those cards. It’s possible that MasterCharge and Access (and others) “merged” to form MasterCard as well.
I’m traveling to the UK in June, so this thread is very timely.
I investigated getting a pin for chip & pin on my Citibank card, and without talking to a person, there is no obvious way to do it. They have lots of documents on their site explaining what the chip is, and even describing chip & pin, but nothing on how to enable it for a US based card. I can add a cash advance pin, but that’s different, and pointless.
Further web searching suggests that because the US based card is chip & sign, that if I attempt to use the chip in the UK that it will request a signature. The comments are that this may confuse some clerks. I can’t vouch for the veracity of that information, but maybe I’ll try it for fun.
My intention is to just tap on everything I see.
Any advice on adding a youth discount to an existing Oyster card before we arrive?