I recently got back from a quick trip to New Orleans, where I test drove three solutions to a problem you may not know you have while travelling.
For me, the better way to avoid foreign transaction fees is to carry one of the new generation of prepaid cards that don’t add foreign transaction fees while travelling. Your purchase is converted from foreign currencies into Canadian dollars at a competitive rate, and that’s it. I have prepaid cards from all three, and brought them with me. But I never touched them once because I loaded each on Google Pay on my phone and accessed my accounts that way. I’ll take Google Pay any day over handling cards. For most transactions, my phone is my wallet now.
I used the Wise card to buy tacos and margaritas at an outdoor restaurant called Barracuda in NOLA’s Algiers Point area. The charge was $41.54, which became $56.88 after at 28-cent conversion fee and an exchange rate where a U.S. dollar was pegged at $1.3624 Canadian. That’s very close to the wholesale rates shown on various forex websites. The tacos were surprisingly great, but then all food in NOLA is.