The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
When holiday destinations go cashless, it’s the tourists who suffer
Quirky currencies and the clink of coins as you pay for a coffee are part of the travel experience. Without cash, it isn’t the same, says Chris Leadbeater
On the surface of it, there is scant similarity between New York and Poprad. One is the Big Apple, the sprawling home of massive skyscrapers and jokes about being so good, they named it twice; the other is the 10th biggest city in Slovakia (and if you can name the larger nine without Wikipedia, you’re a genius. Or Slovakian). Indeed, one of the only things that links them is that I have been through both on my travels in the past year – and I am not so much of a narcissist as to believe that either will be aware of this connection.
Nonetheless, I had the same experience in both places. I proffered a credit card to pay for a drink, and with a shake of a head, and a vague apology, was told that cash was required.
The causes of this retro-request for remuneration were slightly different, yet roughly the same. In the coffee shop in Poprad, it was part of the general ambience of the place – an upmarket café modelled on those gilded salons in Vienna where the gentle clink of coins on the saucer is as much a part of the experience as the tiny jugs of milk and the waiters’ crisp uniforms. In Manhattan, it had to do with the barman’s exasperation at the pace of the technological revolution, which has seen “keep the change” replaced by the convenient swipe of a piece of plastic (“our payment system is offline tonight,” he said, in what we both knew to be a lie). Either way, the left-over dimes, cents and low-number notes went into the servers’ pockets, and the world did not come to a noticeably fiery end.
Of course, the caffeinated traditions of Central Europe and the tip-gathering tricks of the Bowery can only do so much to hold back the tide. And right now, the tide has gone well beyond the beach – and is currently in a cab, heading uptown for a dinner that it would prefer to pay for with cryptocurrency. Where, until relatively recently, cash was king, now it is a sorry figure in exile, wandering in rags around the backwaters of its lost country. Here in the UK, it accounted for only 14 per cent of transactions in 2022; only one in five Britons now name it as their preferred method of payment. Go to Sweden, meanwhile, and our changing world is even more obvious. A recent report by The Telegraph showed that only one per cent of Swedish transactions now involve tangible money.
The gear-shifts behind this acceleration are also self-evident. The unstoppable rise of the smartphone, from the look-at-me accessory of only the hippest tech-hipsters to what is essentially a fifth human limb, did much of the damage in a stealth assault that poor old cash did not see coming. The pandemic – where we weren’t really supposed to touch anything, let alone rummage around in wallets and purses for grubby notes that have been through hundreds of fingers – finished the job. And many people would, I’m sure, argue that this has made life easier. The supermarket queue moves more quickly, now that the cashier does not have to retrieve a clutch of coppers from the till for every bag of carrots sold. You no longer need to traipse to the cash machine in the rain, realising that you are down to your last fiver. Just about everything you may want or need can be bought online via an internet for which the banknote is as much a museum piece as a diplodocus skull.
But equally, the reasons why cash’s eradication might not be to society’s total benefit do not demand much head-scratching. The disappearance of the coin slot from parking meters and vending machines disenfranchises not just the elderly, but anyone who does not feel fully comfortable living their life through a touchscreen. The loss of a phone – whether forgotten on a train, dropped in the sink, or left in a spot where a careless heel brings that awful “kerrrunch” – was already anxiety-inducing before its uber-convenience came to shape your daily existence. And you do not need to be some rabid conspiracy theorist to think that having your every purchase and journey electronically recorded probably amounts to the sort of surveillance society that Orwell mentioned once or twice.
It is in the realm of travel, however, that I am convinced cash needs to be safeguarded.
True, some of the advancements of the past two decades have been to the tourist’s advantage. I am old enough (fortysomething; mind your own business) to have carried traveller’s cheques to exotic places – and then spent much of the trip wondering where to stash them, or worrying about misplacing them. I do not miss their our-man– in-Havana rituals, even if I cashed some of them in splendid rooms with long wooden desks and high ceilings. Nor do I yearn for that frantic midnight telephone call to my bank, trying to explain that yes, I am the fool trying to withdraw 80 bucks in downtown San Francisco – could you please unblock my account? Nowadays, wherever I am, and whatever I pay for with plastic, the card machine seems to purr appreciatively – and even the most obscure transaction elicits nothing more than a message to my banking app inquiring if all is well.
But then, cash provides an extra level of security when you are abroad, or away from the familiar. Last month, during the trip to Slovakia mentioned above, I found myself caught out by the fire at Luton Airport which precipitated the cancellation of 150 flights. I made it home eventually, by planes, trains and automobiles – but my first response was to take out €300 from a hole in the wall as a precautionary measure. Against what? I don’t know exactly – a lost phone, a dead battery, an arrival in a town staffed entirely by coffee-shop waiters and barmen who won’t accept cards. Ultimately, I didn’t need it, but knowing I had it there in my wallet was a reassurance on what was a relatively tricky day.
Admittedly, my attachment to cash is also a romantic self-indulgence. I have a box into which, when I return home, I drop the loose change and leftover notes from the trip I have just finished. For the most part, these are small-value euros and dollars, but there are other currencies in there – Turkish lira, Moroccan dirham, Brazilian reais and Indian rupees. Each is a souvenir of a former journey, a memory made. And I’m sure that, if I root to the bottom, I will find a coin or two that have long since become obsolete; a French franc, a Spanish peseta, a Portuguese escudo. Eventually, I imagine – and perhaps sooner than you think – even the American greenback will no longer hold proper value; all we do and all we spend reduced to digital data. I will miss George Washington’s rumpled paper face – and Mr Lincoln, Mr Jefferson and Mr Jackson too. I will not, I suspect, be the only one.
Until recently, cash was king; now it is a sorry figure in exile, wandering in rags around its lost country