The company I worked for issued travelers checks for all business travel until about 1990. After that it was all credit cards, sometimes even ones issued to the company.
I never leave home without them.
No, that’s definitely not the point. In the anecdote I was responding to, the poster was getting cash from a foreign bank. So any ‘replace if stolen’ protection would not be there, as he was getting foreign currency to carry around, not traveler’s checks. I guess he’d have the protection during the ‘plane flight - walk to foreign bank’ leg of the trip, but that seems like a small fraction of the trip.
all travelers checks were was an international money order or that’s how they were described to me when grandpa used them on our vacations in the 80s
Last time was around 1993. The first time I got cash from an ATM in Cairo marked the last time I would get traveler’s checks.
1988, Ft. Gordon, GA. I had to take them to AAFES and exchange them for cash because the junk yard where I wanted to buy an engine wouldn’t accept them, and military policy was no paychecks in cash, only in travellers’ checks, unless your direct deposit was already working.
Except that often there was no need to walk to a bank to exchange traveler’s checks for cash. They have become much less common since the 90’s because credit cards and ATM’s have become more common. But when traveler’s checks were more popular people would buy the checks at home (in the local currency of wherever they were visiting) and simply use the checks to pay for purchases since many businesses accepted them. So that “replace if lost or stolen” covered the whole vacation, not just the plane flight and walk to the bank.
The anecdote you responded to happened in the mid-90s , so it may have already become uncommon for businesses to accept traveler’s checks as payment- but if he had bought traveler’s checks in the US, it would have taken roughly the same time to convent them into local currency as it would have taken him to convert US currency into the local currency. And it’s very possible that his hotel would have cashed the traveler’s checks for him , which would have allowed him to cash some every day or two and minimize the amount of cash he was carrying around.
- I worked at fast food restaurants in the 80s that accepted traveler’s checks and most other restaurants and stores and hotels did as well.
How odd. Your military pay was in traveler’s checks?
By the mid/late 1980s, at least in CONUS posts, the payclerks would no longer disburse in cash, so if for any reason you could not direct-deposit (such as the account still being processed) what would happen was that you would get a paycheck, then have it “cashed” in travelers’ cheques at the next table over. I experienced that once in Basic Training, by the time the next pay period came around the direct deposit had kicked in.
At the time you were already being told to to set up an account that allowed direct deposit and ATM. However at that time that sort of account was not yet universal and many new enlistees were unbanked.
That BTW was my one and only use of travelers’ cheques, ever.
It sounds like your “paycheck” was actually a voucher, redeemable only at specified locations, like the military clerk at the next table. If it was truly a check, it could have been cashed anywhere checks are accepted, like a bank or merchant.
It’s possible- but it’s way more likely that those who were cashing their checks at the next table simply didn’t have a local bank account and preferred getting traveler’s checks to paying a fee at a check cashing business. Even back then , few businesses would cash paychecks- supermarkets were the big exception.
It was an actual check. We could have taken it and deposited it, or taken it to AAFES and have it cashed. The money order desk (which I think was AAFES) was just a convenience, and took the pressure off the military for handling cash. That is, the military would give us the check, and then we would go to the AAFES desk to cash the check, but policy wouldn’t allow us to have more than a token amount of cash, so the rest was via purchasing travellers’ checks.
This meant that AAFES was handling the cash, but AAFES was also earning all of those travellers’ check fees.
1991 in Switzerland.
1984, when I hitched to New York City from New Mexico.
Pain in the butt to find a place that would process them — essentially only the banks that sold them themselves would touch them. I did in fact end up having them stolen, did have the receipt in my wallet, and although I spent the better part of an afternoon being stared at with utmost dubiety and suspicion by the bank personnel, they grudgingly allowed as to how I passed all the litmus tests and replaced them. I think they were still trying to suss out exactly how the scam worked when I went out their door.
Yeah, ATM machines after that.
1986, I think. We got them for a cross-country driving trip in 1985, and I think we got some for a similar long-distance vacation (though via air, not car) the following year.
Back then, ATMs were indeed less ubiquitous than they are now, and you had to really work to find one that was on your bank’s extended network.
As far as safer than cash: I suppose a thief, seeing a pile of cash versus a few traveler’s checks, would have grabbed the cash instead - but I honestly don’t recall what other protection they gave. I don’t remember whether we had to show ID to spend them, or whether we had to sign them on receipt and again on spending, or what… or what would keep us from simply reporting them stolen (after having spent them).