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“Convenient but beware of the poor exchange rate”

written by on 29/01/2014

Loaded this card with Australian dollars to take from New Zealand. Was very convenient and worked at all ATMs and any store/restaurant I tried it in with no problems. Good to be able to withdraw enough cash for a couple of days at a time rather than carry cash for 2 weeks around.

Can only comment on my experience in Melbourne, but while Travelex don't charge any fees for ATM use overseas, the only ATMs I found that wouldn't charge their own fees were Westpac and Bank of Melbourne. Every other one warned me it would charge $3 before continuing, so I cancelled until finding a free one. Luckily I managed to find Westpac didn't charge on day 1 so continued using them for the rest of the time.

Main thing to note is the poor exchanage rate offered when you reload money onto it. On setup there is a charge of the great of $10NZ or 1% of the initial load. After that there is only a $1 charge each time you reload via bill payment. So I thought I would be clever and load an amount that would only charge me the minimum $10 initially, then reload the rest to only pay $1. On setup the bank (my regular one) gave me a reasonable rate for the initial load (think it was $0.90 compared to the $0.91 advertised rate).

However, when the money I reloaded came through and I logged into change it into AUD, I was only given $0.87 on the day that the news said the rate had reached a peak of $0.93. So instead of just the $1 bill payment fee I got about $80 less than if I had walked into a bank and exchanged cash. The bank didn't tell me the rate would be so terrible when reloading, although as it's administered by Travelex and not them they probably didn't know.

So overall it was a useful and easy card to use and the exchange rate at setup is decent. But I would advise trying to load the total you want at setup. You'll may have to pay a bit more than the $10 minimum it's more than $1000 but it will be less than the amount you'll lose on the poor exchange rate offered to reloads.