Why I’m so incensed by rip-off money exchange merchants who blight our airports

NOT SINCE the difficult months following the Great Recession of 2008 has the pound been so weak against other major currencies. The rising prospect of a No Deal Brexit is spooking the foreign exchange markets.

Every time prime ministerial contenders Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt dangle the threat of No Deal in front of Brussels, the pound shudders, and tumbles even further.

That could mean British holidaymakers cutting out the first course in some delightful taverna. Their second bottle of wine is already in jeopardy. And the smooth air-conditioned hire car on which they had set their hearts may have to be swapped for a sweltering jalopy.

In short, this summer, millions of our tourists will experience the painful effects of Brexit in a direct way as they discover that countries which used to offer good value for money have suddenly become ruinously expensive.

What is to be done? One possible solution is to go to Turkey, whose currency is one of the very few in the world to have slipped against the pound since this time a year ago.

But Turkey is not everyone’s cup of tea. It’s very hot at the moment, for one thing, and is even more unstable under the loosening grip of President Erdogan than our own fair island.

Avoid Turkey, and the only remedy is to make our pounds go further. We must learn to elude the sharks who traditionally expect a generous cut whenever we exchange our money for foreign currency. Top of my hate-list are airport

bureaux de change. It’s many years since I was daft enough to throw myself at their mercy, but every time I pass one of them I am nonetheless filled with rage as I examine their exorbitant rates.

For a fleeting second I know what it feels like to be a Corbynista presented with a smug banker. I can briefly understand the lure of the barricade, and the joy of throwing a rotten cabbage at a fat-cat capitalist.

THE eyes of the cashiers in these licensed rip- off joints are filled with a kind of predatory wonder as an elderly Japanese man or an unsuspecting housewife from Milwaukee wanders towards them to be fleeced.

Having cheerfully dealt with you, they may smarmily offer the reassurance that, should you have some unused currency when you return, they will happily re-convert it at the same rate. It’s a bit like a pickpocket offering to give back some of his ill-gotten gains.

Yesterday, at Gatwick Airport, Moneycorp was offering the following ‘walk-up rate’. If you had produced one pound, you would have got 0.8952 euros. Yet the official quoted exchange rate around the same time was 1.1065 euros. Of course, any bureau de

change is entitled to make a profit, and no establishment will ever match the official rate. Nonetheless, Moneycorp’s enormous mark- up seems outrageous.

The company justifies it by citing ‘ the significant cost associated with operating [at Gatwick] from ground rent

and additional security, to the cost of staffing the bureaux for customers on early and late flights’.

Convincing? It’s true that Moneycorp offers better rates online. But this is of little comfort to the person at the airport who finds him or herself suddenly in need of cash.

How is this allowed? We are supposed to be a civilised country. But it’s not civilised to dun innocent travellers who have only just arrived in Britain, and may not speak English. Nor is it decent to do down our own countrymen.

Such outfits presumably calculate that they have captive customers. They resemble motorway petrol stations, whose owners think they can charge 10 or 20 per cent more than your local forecourt because there is no alternative, unless you feel like pushing your car home.

I realise that these days airports are privately owned so it may not be easy for government to intervene. But aren’t these money-changers exploiting their monopoly position? We all know the authorities could do something about this scam if they really cared, but they don’t.

High Street banks aren’t much better. Well, there’s a surprise! Money Mail advised yesterday that department stores and some supermarkets generally offer more favourable rates. John Lewis was judged the best. I’ve certainly used them.

That said, some of us don’t like carrying a lot of cash, particularly if we are visiting slightly dodgy places, while others find that the foreign currency they have exchanged doesn’t stretch as far as they had hoped.

Sooner or later, most of us will have recourse to debit or credit cards when abroad. And here again greedy middle-men believe they have a God-given right to dip their hands into our funds and walk off with a fat commission.

MY OWN dear bank — Government-controlled RBS, whose branches, incidentally, seem more or less to have disappeared — pockets various fees whenever I use my debit card in foreign climes to withdraw cash or buy goods. It also applies an exchange rate that could fairly be described as disappointing.

Other High Street banks doubtless behave in a similarly rapacious manner. One way or another, any foreign transaction using such a bank’s debit or credit card attracts extra costs amounting to several per cent of the price.

I’ve absolutely no expertise as a financial adviser, and so am in no position to offer professional guidance. All I can do is mention so-called challenger banks such as Starling or Monzo. In my experience, they don’t slap on extortionate fees, and offer a very competitive exchange rate.

It’s easy to open an account. Even so, beware of the avarice of foreign banks. On recent

trips to Greece and Italy, a ‘hole in the wall’ helped itself to a hefty commission when I withdrew money using my Starling card. Big banks are grasping and usurious wherever you find them.

When the pound was riding high a few years ago, most of us took such chicanery on the chin. But now that sterling is falling, the canny traveller must try to make his dwindling pounds go further.

Does it ever occur to Boris Johnson or Jeremy Hunt, as they increasingly dwell on the prospect of No Deal while clambering for power, that some of us will have to pull in our horns as a result?

I don’t blame them because I can see that plausibly invoking No Deal is the best way of making the EU re-consider its terms — in particular the rightly criticised Northern Irish backstop, which potentially binds Britain into the Customs Union.

But I hope they realise they are playing for high stakes, and that outside the bubble of the Tory leadership race their threats are having serious consequences in the real world.

A weak currency is very seldom a bonus. It makes our exports cheaper ( not that there is any evidence of an export boom) but increases the cost of imports, and is therefore inflationary.

Maybe the pound will be higher this time next year. But I expect it’ll go down before it goes up, so we had better get used to feeling like poor relations when travelling abroad.