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Are you considering travelling overseas? Perhaps you have been working hard all year and can’t wait to get overseas? Have you booked your dream trip away that might include several different countries or even a trip right around the world? If you are planning to take a holiday then most likely you will need to go down to your local foreign exchange and change some money over into your destination currency, or even into several destination currencies.

Even with the introduction of the Euro making travelling around Europe a little easier, there are still quite a few countries exempt from the Euro making a trip around Europe an expensive excursion. If you were to fly to Switzerland and then drive across Austria to Hungary you would need three different currencies – Swiss Franc, Euro and Hungarian Forint. Changing your money into one currency is hard enough without having to deal with three. This can often prove to be a costly exercise and you could end up with three different types of currencies that you no longer need at the end of your holiday.

One of the mostly costly aspects of a holiday, after the air flights and accommodation can often be the exchange rate. Many companies can charge you ridiculous prices to change money between currencies, making sure that they take a large split. These spreads can often be 10-20% of the actual exchange rate meaning that you are often paying quite a lot of money just to change it into another currency. Add on to this the fact that you often left over with a great deal of currency at the end of your trip which you then need to convert back into your local currency and you can end up spending quite a lot of money.

You cannot escape the fees by attempting to use a bank card, as any bank institution will charge you a certain amount to withdraw money from a foreign cashpoint, this is on top of the charges that also apply. These charges can range from a fixed ATM withdrawal fee to a certain percentage of the withdrawal being kept by the bank as a transfer fee.

Credit cards also can fall prey to increasingly expensive fees. Using credit cards overseas often incurs both a service fee as well as a certain percentage of the transaction fee being taken by the bank. Add to this the percentage margins that are already being made on the exchange rate given to you by your bank and you can find that your holiday is suddenly turning out to be very expensive.

An alternative to costly exchange fees are buying a prepaid travel card. Available from many outlets and in most currencies, these cards allow you to load up a certain currency and can be used very similar to a bank card in most countries but without the accompanying fees. These prepaid cards can also stop people from over-spending and are proving to be popular particularly with younger travelers.

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