Money money money!

[coinneach]

We used Fairfx for a few years but changed to Starling and no regrets.
Fee free and good exchange rate.

[LIZH]

I miss the days of getting $1.98 to the pound 😭

[Gabsnoot]

I didn’t know about Starling, thank you to everyone who mentioned it. I just checked it out on MSE, I’m going to open an account for our next trip 😊

[Kraken]

Unless the exchange rate is extremely volatile, I don't bother too much about it. I use the Post Office credit card (now replaced by JAJA). It's fee-free & you always get the Visa or Mastercard interbank exchange rate, i.e. the best possible on the day.

Admittedly, we only really pay for meals out, food for the apartment & a bit of shopping at the outlets, so are hardly huge spenders. Yes, I could probably save a little by playing the exchange rate game, but for me it's not worth the hassle. I only ever take a few hundred dollars in cash, as cash cannot be replaced if lost/stolen. Cards can. In addition, with the JAJA card being a credit card, you benefit from Section 75 cover.

As an aside, I recently had to dispute an overseas mail-order payment made on my old Post Office card - but after it had subsequently transferred to JAJA. They [JAJA] were brilliant and did not try to shirk responsibilities for the dispute in any way. Got my money back within 10 days, so I can highly recommend their customer service.

[itz_baseline]

We just have a Monzo and a Starling account and use those for most purchases. Starling is free cash withdrawals from ATMs so this is our preferred, but have Monzo as a back up in case there’s any issues with Starling.

Exchange is done fee free in real time based on MasterCard exchange rates for both cards. App pings through 10 seconds after the purchase showing details of the transaction in both USD and GBP.

We usually have around $100 in cash from previous trips that we take for tolls and stuff on the first drive from the airport.