Advice re which card to use; Travellers or Debit

[shushh]

Like many of the others, we use a combination. We take the following:

1) CBA travel card. Have had no difficulties using it as a credit card. If we do take cash out, we do it in large amounts to minimise the number of times we have to do it (to avoid the fees that another poster has mentioned)

2) Cash

3) Our 28 degrees mastercard which has no international transaction fees/conversion fees

4) Our normal credit card

 

[Sugarglider]

wow - everybody does so many different things - I suppose you just have to decide what you are most comfortable with.
I am a travel card person - I just returned from 6 weeks in NY, Orlando and Washington DC and took the QantasCash card and the Travellex Multi Currency card. had been slowly loading them up in small amounts when the $ was strong.
I have not left australia with USA cash on me - ummm..... ever. I just land in the US, go to the ATM in the airport and withdraw. And now that it has been mentioned - I never saw a USA $100 bill - the ATM's give out $50 and $20. So whilst I suspect the problem does exist, I never had to face it. keeping up my stock of $1 bills for tipping was more my focus!
I had my ordinary daily credit cards with me in case I wanted more $$.
the Hotels accepted my Travellex card or Qantas Card for security - probably because they are labelled Visa and Mastercard. I found it hard to keep track of the Travellex because of the holds hotels would put on them and found the balance going up and down.
Everything worked smoothly with both cards - I appreciate the good exchange rate, the low fee, and now Qantas have just announced faster transfer times - no more waiting 3 days.

OH - the one slip up I faced - I had purchased a USA sim card for my phone - so i was on a different number. So when going into my online banking I couldn't do any transactions that required receiving a security code by SMS. Unless i wanted to swap the SIM cards over - but I am very lazy.
So make sure your travel card supplier is pre-authorised in your online banking so that you can do bpay reloads and not have to do the SMS security code thing.

 

[WanderlustNZ]

I just never seem to get around to getting a travellers card, and I can't be bothered organising one for this upcoming trip since we're only away 2 weeks and most big expenses are paid. But I can definitely see their benefits. Particularly if you are committed and start loading them about 6 months or so out - every time you notice a strong dollar.

At present I just travel with cash and credit. I get enough cash that I am well covered for small purchases, tipping, or any situation where I can't use my cc or don't feel comfortable doing so. For the USA in particular I go into the back and put in a money order for US dollars. The bank usually carries twenties and fifties, but I always want at least $50 to be made up of smaller notes such as fives and ones. That way I'm ready straight away to tip shuttle drivers and baggage handlers etc.

All bigger purchases I charge to my credit card. As long as I don't make any cash advances, the fees are no different than when I use my CC here in NZ to pay for overseas hotels, car rental etc. It's a fee I'm okay with and I get roughly half of it back anyway in reward dollars. I then just make sure I pay everything off before the interest kicks in a few months later.

Also worth noting, when I compare the exchange rate set by my cc to the exchange rate set by the travellers cards I can choose from here in NZ, my cc is almost always stronger. I did the maths once, and I noticed that even though my cc charges a small overseas transaction fee, and the travellers card I was looking at didn't, the better exchange rate and the reward points I was getting for my cc made up for this. My advice when it comes to comparing all types of cards is to not just look at the fees, but also at how they calculate their exchange rate.

 

[Caroline NZ]

I like the Travelcard because I can load it in the foreign currency when the rate is high, whereas with the credit card rate is at the time of purchase, so more uncertainty.
This will be our 4th trip using the travelcard, and it has work perfectly for our needs. The statement / list of transactions on line is instant too, so a good tracking tool, whereas credit card purchases can take some time to come through.
In saying that we always use a combo of cash, travelcard and credit card (credit card is used for pre authorisations as required ), I like to have a number of funding options

 

[WanderlustNZ]

Given that there is pretty much no certainty when it comes to changes in the exchange rate, I think it comes down more to personal comfort.

I booked a lot of things back near last Xmas because I saw the exchange rate as being strong. For the next 6 months it continued to go up and up. There's no point crying over spilt milk as at least I was happy at the time, and just as easily the dollar could have gone down, but it just goes to show you can't tell.

Interestingly, I know some fairly financially savy people who pay the bare minimum of anything until the very last minute. They argue that the certainty of money sitting in a high interest savings account, or sitting on their revolving credit style mortgage and keeping mortgage interest payments down, is better than worrying about the uncertainty of the exchange rate. They then put every purchase they can onto their credit card and wait until a day or two before interest sets in to pay it off. This theory, while it makes some sense to me, just doesn't sit well with my personality. I get excited about booking things and would hate to wait for last minute.

I think at the end of the day everyone is different and I'm not confident there is any right or wrong answer. Do your research, do what suits your personality, and then be prepared to be happy with your choice (even if it wasn't necessarily the right one ).

 

[Caroline NZ]

Certainly for prepaying I use our credit card (never the Travelcard as that is not it's purpose for us). But for purchases (shopping, shopping shopping, love the Outlet malls) when we are actually on the trip I much prefer the Travelcard . Think I will go and load some extra this week, now that our trip has been brought forwards into October

 

[dollarmite]

the Hotels accepted my Travellex card or Qantas Card for security - probably because they are labelled Visa and Mastercard. I found it hard to keep track of the Travellex because of the holds hotels would put on them and found the balance going up and down.

We'll also be travelling with the Qantas Cash Card (Debit Mastercard) - our hotels will be prepaid. When you checked in, did they use the QCC for incidentals etc by putting a hold on funds? Did you have to wait ages for it to be released or was that issue just with the Travelex card? Did there seem to be a standard amount across all the hotels or was it pretty random? (We won't have actual credit cards with us).

OH - the one slip up I faced - I had purchased a USA sim card for my phone - so i was on a different number. So when going into my online banking I couldn't do any transactions that required receiving a security code by SMS. Unless i wanted to swap the SIM cards over - but I am very lazy.
So make sure your travel card supplier is pre-authorised in your online banking so that you can do bpay reloads and not have to do the SMS security code thing

Yikes, thanks for the reminder. I'd better contact my banks too and find an alternative to the SMS code thing. We bought an Australia Post Travel SIM card for our Asian trip at Christmas and it just would not work. I would never recommend this to anybody. This trip we'll just use internet to keep in touch with people.

 

[aussiemumma101]

.

 

[TulipsNZ]

We have a cash passport travel card, it took 5 minutes to set up and we loaded it on advice from our banking manager when our dollar was pretty high, it's dropped every day since so it was good timing. Most things like accommodation and flights have been prepaid while the dollar was high but it's nice knowing we have money easily available in all the currencies we will use as we are doing a bit of a world trip. I'm a real eftpos/card person so this option suits us well.