Advanced options
The airport bureau's rate is the worst legal exchange in Britain: ordering online for airport collection improves it instantly. Standard bank cards stack a ~3% loading + flat per-transaction fees: the fee-free travel debit cards (several major app banks) charge neither and use the real rate. Carry SOME cash regardless: markets, tips and the taxi that "can't take card" exist everywhere.
What The Travel Money Calculator Works Out
- Lost to fees and spreads: your spending money multiplied by the percentage your chosen method loses against the real exchange rate. Airport bureaux run 5-10% off the interbank rate, high street and online bureaux 2-3%, standard bank cards about 3%, and fee-free travel debit cards roughly nothing.
- The one rule abroad: when a card terminal or ATM offers to charge you in pounds, refuse and pay in the local currency. Dynamic currency conversion adds 3-8% for arithmetic your bank would do better for free.
- The setup that fixes it: one fee-free travel card as the working wallet, a backup card in the hotel safe, and 10-20% of spending money in local cash for markets, tips and the taxi whose card machine is eternally broken.
- Custom rate loading (advanced): override the dropdown with your card's actual non-sterling transaction fee or a bureau's quoted margin, for example 2.75% or 2.99%.
- ATM fees and withdrawals (advanced): many standard cards charge a flat GBP 1.50 to GBP 5 per foreign cash withdrawal on top of the percentage loading, so several small withdrawals cost more than one larger one. Fee-free travel cards usually allow a monthly cash allowance at no charge.
- Flat fee per card purchase (advanced): some older bank cards add a fixed fee of GBP 1 to GBP 1.50 to every foreign purchase, which punishes the small coffee-and-ice-cream transactions holidays are made of. The flat fees card totals both kinds.
- Cost of saying yes to "pay in pounds" (advanced): the share of your spend where you accept the terminal's conversion, multiplied by its markup (typically 5%, ranging 3-8%). Set it to zero to see what declining every time is worth.
- Total leak, all-in (advanced): percentage loading plus flat fees plus dynamic currency conversion, as a sum and as a percentage of the spending money. This is the rare travel cost that buys no experience whatsoever.
- What you actually get to spend (advanced): the money that survives the fees, converted at the real exchange rate you enter (foreign units per GBP 1, for example 1.17 for euros), beside what the full amount would have bought.
- Leak per year (advanced): the all-in leak multiplied by trips a year, with the ten-year figure underneath. A GBP 40 leak per trip compounds across a travelling lifetime into four figures.