Recently my wife C and I spent seven weeks in Europe. Unfortunately we had to carry most of our money in the form of travelers checks. All I can say is that I wish we could have just said no.
We ended up taking many travelers checks because here in Japan, many banks do not have integrated ATMs. That is, generally, customers cannot use their ATM card at another Japanese banks ATM, let alone internationally. In order to get a bank card that can be used in properly networked cash points requires a special, expensive account at only the largest national banks. Which of course, have few branches and fewer ATMs out here in the country side.
So we decided to go with American Express travelers checks. The Yen/euro exchange rate at the time was very favorable and we thought it would be worth it to lock in the good exchange rate as well as avoid the hassle of setting up a new account in a new bank that we could draw funds from internationally. (Let alone the hassles that invariably come from a foreigner trying to set up an account.) So we converted a fat stack of Yen into Euro in the form of Amex travelers checks.
American Express advertises that it has thousands upon thousands of locations world wide where you can cash your checks without commission.
As far as I was able to ascertain, this is a dirty, rotten lie.
While there are many, many places to cash travelers checks, there are very few places that will cash the checks without some form of commission. Most places want to charge a 2-5% fee in addition to a 5-10 euro surcharge. So not only do you pay a fee when you buy the checks, you get hit again when you want to actually use them. (Very few places, outside the most overpriced of tourist trap stores, will actually let you use travelers checks “like cash”)
While you could indeed cash them without any charge at (most) Amex offices, and a few other companies (usually) like Travelex usually let us cash them without fees, finding a place that didn’t want to charge a 5% commission was a huge hassle. Even some Amex buildings, like the one in Barcelona would only cash them with a commission. Other cities, like Milan, simply had no Amex facilities. Well, Milan HAD an Amex storefront, and we got directions to go there. When we got there, however, we discovered that it had been closed down.
Even when there was a place that you could cash the checks, like they advertised, for free it was still far from easy. In Florence I had to wait nearly two hours in line in order to cash some checks. Which I thoroughly enjoyed. After all, when you are traveling in another country, who would not want to spend hours waiting in line to cash their checks.
The net result of this was that when we could find a place that we could cash our checks and not lose our shirt in the process, we would cash very large amounts at a time.
Which means, of course that we had to carry rather large amounts of cash at a time, which was exactly what we had hoped to avoid by buying travelers checks in the first place.
If I didn’t bring my ATM card that is tied to an account in the U.S. a few times C and I would have been in real trouble.
When we travel again, will we carry travelers checks? Possibly, if we get a chance to lock in a very favorable exchange rate, or we were going someplace where we knew they wouldn’t be a problem. Other then that they seem to be mostly pointless. Sure there are ATM fees to consider but overall it seems that travelers checks are going the way of the dinosaur
Repatriate 