Best International Credit Card?

I always used visa or MasterCard in Europe, but there were some tricks to learn at first. You could use Amex but it wasn't accepted everywhere like the others.

From what I remember my Australian friends saying, they don't have the fancy chipped cards there

Some tips from my travels
You can't get gas in Germany without a chipped card. You can buy a chipped travelex/forex card from those thieves in the airport, but I refused to do that. I just filled up in Denmark or Netherlands before driving through Germany. Or carried cash.

I had to tell a lot of places it's an American card and to manually swipe, they treated it like a chipped card usually.

Some US companies are starting to offer chipped cards now which is great, but I'm not traveling at all anymore.

Find a card that doesn't charge foreign transaction fee's. Try USAA, smaller credit unions, smaller banks. All my major company (bank of america, chase, etc) cards charged a % fee but the local bank I had at the time did not.

Good luck opening a local bank account too, had lots of American friends that couldn't open accounts bc the local banks hated the reporting requirements for US treasury/IRS. If they could get an account they usually had to get a local friend to co-sign on the acct with them.

quote:

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chase sapphire preferred

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+1

I was there right before the 08 Olympics so my experience of china was much different than my wife's 2 semesters of school there.

Pretty much same as above, forgot to add don't use stand alone ATM's.

in Europe all the ATM's attached to grocery stores do not charge a fee.

In china we went to the big banks to use the ATM or the hotel rate. We were staying in a luxury 6 star hotel so the rate was pretty good. We also Didnt really need cash other than for drinking and buying junk on the street.

I would start the look here

LINK

Please don't take what I said as saying AMEX is a bad choice, just in my experience it was only accepted at like half the stores/restaurants I went to. I just got in the habit of pulling out my visa.

I've been living in Germany for the past three years and did a ton of research about this then. Only use the Capitol one Visa card. It's the only card that does not charge a currency conversion or foreign transaction fee. Every other card out there charges some kind of fee.

Also to the person that says you need a chipped EC card in Germany to buy gas, you are wrong. A regular credit card works with no issues.