INSIST – AND SAVE ON EXCHANGE RATE
CLAUDIA MYERS was on holiday with her boyfriend on Portugal’s Algarve coast last week when on Thursday she went to draw €150 from a cash machine.
She was faced with making the snap choice between accepting or rejecting a deal with instant conversion to pounds.
The machine (pictured left) offered her the choice of completing the transaction in her home currency, displaying the apparently reassuring sum in sterling.
Claudia, 23, says: ‘It was confusing but someone had warned me this wouldn’t be a good deal so I rejected it.’
By doing so the marketing executive from Dulwich, South-East London, avoided paying about 10 per cent extra, the difference between her quoted rate of €1.07 and MasterCard rate of €1.18. For the €150 she withdrew, this meant a saving of £14.26, at the push of a button.
THE Mail on Sunday’s travel editor Frank Barrett has just returned from Beijing, where the Hilton hotel at the airport presented the bill for his one-night stay in pounds rather than Chinese yuan.
Frank says: ‘I’d signed the credit card docket before I realised that they had charged in sterling. When I pointed it out they offered to change it, but I was in a rush. I reckon that cost me up to £10.’
WITH more time to spare, Colin Nicholson contested the bill presented to him at a Brussels hotel last summer. He says: ‘I always refuse to pay in sterling, but I was not even given an option to pay in euros.’
Colin, a travel writer, asked the receptionist to change it. He says: ‘She acted surprised and admitted she had pressed the “pay in sterling” button herself, claiming customers preferred it. But she didn’t make a fuss of refunding the sum, then billing me again in euros.’
By doing so, Colin, 47, avoided a 4.6 per cent surcharge on his bill, little more than £1, but he says: ‘It’s the principle.’
BRITISH tourists are not the only ones targeted. Camille Chauvelot, 34, from Paris, was faced with the choice of euros or dollars at a cash machine in New York last year. The post-production artist says: ‘I know it’s common in Turkey, but didn’t think it would happen in the US. I knew it would be a poor deal, so said no.’