Anyone like to do a Key Post on Holiday Money?

Brendan Burgess

Brendan Burgess

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I was busy recently before a short trip to London and didn't get a chance to buy some sterling. So I had to buy it from the ICE booth at the airport. I knew it was more expensive, but I had no real idea how much more expensive.

Here are the rates compared with AIB yesterday

|sell sterling|buy sterling|difference
ICE |82|91|11%
AIB|86.45|92|6%
In addition, ICE charges a commission of 2.35% with a minimum charge, but no maximum. I think AIB charges a maximum.

My £100 sterling cost me €125.15. If I gave it straigt back to them, they would have given me back €105.68 - that's a loss of 16%, so you could say that the cost of buying sterling is around 8%. I think it works out about 4% from AIB.

I was annoyed with myself for not being organised enough to avoid these high charges, but there were queues at all the ICE booths.

Anyone like to do a Key Post on the topic. For example, I assume that paying by Credit Card is always the best rate.
 
Sorry but can't resist, you should have used your atm card to get sterling when you arrived. It pays the rate the bank pays the day they receive the notice and is not subject to commission afaik.
 
elcato said:
Sorry but can't resist, you should have used your atm card to get sterling when you arrived. It pays the rate the bank pays the day they receive the notice and is not subject to commission afaik.
Click to expand...

Yeah, +1on that.

However, I have a Tesco credit card and rang them to ask about charges if I loaded cash into my CC and withdrew it in Turkey. Charge 2.75%. NIB would charge me 3.5% up to a max of €11.43 per transaction(min €3.17) to withdraw cash from an ATM in Turkey.

I bought cash in my credit union (Fexco - never the cheapest) and got TL2.19 per €. Not too bad a haircut, bout 4-5%. Bringing Euro cash to exchange out there. I hear the exchange rate in FX Bureau and bars etc is not too bad.

Slim
 
elcato said:
you should have used your atm card to get sterling when you arrived. It pays the rate the bank pays the day they receive the notice and is not subject to commission afaik.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately, I had absolutely no sterling at all. I did go to the Bank of Ireland in Dublin Airport, but it was closed.

I wasn't going to leave it to finding a bank in Heathrow as I assumed that the costs would be the same.

So I just bought a small amount of sterling and used my credit card for the rest.

A few people have told me that they paid no commission, but that is only one part of the cost. The bigger part is the spread between the buying and selling rate.

Brendan
 
Brendan, Just in case you arent aware as I wasnt I was in my bank yesterday and in the past did not think I was being charged for using my credit card to pay for items broad but on one of my last trips to the UK I noticed on my statement there was now a foreign currency charge for it....

So yesterday in there I asked them why I was apparently now being charged for using my card in the UK (I was aware it was a bad idea to withdraw money from an ATM with my card over there). Bottom line apparently I was being charged for paying for things over there all along but in recent times the bank are just obliged to show it separately I wasnt too impressed though grateful to the staff member for making me aware of this...

Aplogies for the badly written post guys hope its clear what I mean.
 
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