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Best International Credit Card?
Posted on 2/25/13 at 2:20 pm
Posted on 2/25/13 at 2:20 pm
Moving to Sydney in a few months, what's the best kind of plastic to be carrying around? Any jet-setters on here had good/bad experiences with certain credit cards around the globe? What's the most widely accepted card?
TIA!
TIA!
Posted on 2/25/13 at 2:53 pm to FootballNostradamus
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.
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.
Posted on 2/26/13 at 8:21 am to FootballNostradamus
I have a platinum Amex. Just got back from Iceland and other parts of europe. Travel a good bit and it works very well.
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