Bits: my worst ever Dynamic Currency Conversion scam, Flybe sale, good Iberia Plus wine offer

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.

• Alan says:

  5 Mar5 March 07:55

  That’s dreadful that they had it setup that way for less savvy customers – I’d drop a complaint to Diamond Desk to highlight the issue (and probably get some HHonors points too!).

• Barney says:

  5 Mar5 March 08:15

  I’ve booked several nights in NYC/BOS via the German hotels.com site, so prices were showing in Euro. Should I then insist to pay in $ when checking out to avoid being scammed? I am a bit confused.

  • Rob says:

    5 Mar5 March 08:22

    Hotel will charge you in $. They may or may not give you option to pay in £, which you should refuse. Euro will not come into it.

• Graham says:

  5 Mar5 March 08:18

  Yes, Vinoseleccion….very nice wines, hopeless customer service.

  They also phone you every few weeks from Madrid to pester you in to buying more wine. Avoid would be my advice.

  • Mark says:

    5 Mar5 March 09:48

    That’s strange. I’ve bought several times from them and never had one sales call. Wines arrived on time and as expected. Avios points take at least 3-4 weeks to post but they appear in the end. No reason to avoid in my experience.

    • Liz says:

      5 Mar5 March 19:41

      I’ve used them twice and they were great – also no pestering phone calls. Free delivery and points posted a few weeks later – no hassles. Would definitely use them again.

      • harry says:

        6 Mar6 March 16:41

        Same here – wines were very good quality, nice way to activate the IB a/c, no phone calls

  • Gavin says:

    5 Mar5 March 12:04

    They were very good when I had to get it redelivered (they wouldn’t leave it by my porch), took a while to get an English speaker on the line but after that sorted in a few days.

    Keep sending me mailshots tho

• Duncan S says:

  5 Mar5 March 08:28

  I had a similar problem at a hotel in Dublin. Was tired when paying and didn’t notice they’d charged my Halifax Clarity in GBP instead of EUR. I insisted the manager refund the original transaction and process it again in Euros. I was never given the choice.

  Out of interest, am I to assume that the SuperCard > Curve > Amex route doesn’t work? I have to assume so based on you using Curve directly and getting hit with the 1% fee.

  • Mark says:

    5 Mar5 March 10:10

    Unlikely to. Curve is classed as a prepaid card and you can’t link prepaid cards to a Supercard. It would in any case completely screw Supercard’s business model due to the high fees so if it did work I can see them shutting it down pretty quickly.

• Anna Tomlinson says:

  5 Mar5 March 08:47

  Thanks for highlighting this. I always choose sterling, when asked, but on a recent trip to Düsseldorf also had the experience of another commenter when the receptionist used my check in swipe to conclude the transaction in Euro. I asked for it to be reversed and it was. I had previously had the experience of getting immediate fx credit card refunds and then finding when my statement arrived that in the few minutes between the purchase and the refund a rate change meant I paid more than I got refunded. However, this time the rate change worked in my favour and I came out with a 20p profit. Result!!

  • TimS says:

    5 Mar5 March 09:03

    Why do you always choose Sterling and voluntarily get screwed on the rate?

    Raffles is advising you to always choose local currency when offered as the rate is significantly more favourable to you.

    • Brendan says:

      5 Mar5 March 10:20

      Not sure if this is the case here but I know people who need to claim business expenses back weeks later prefer to pay in £ as it saves hassle with exchange rate movements going against them when they come to claim,

      • Mark says:

        5 Mar5 March 10:46

        And if they’re putting business expenses through a personal card they’re probably benefiting from more points due to the higher cost….

        These days most people have online access to transaction details. I’ve always put foreign currency expenses through at the amount of the converted Sterling charge. If you have something like a Supercard (or Curve) it should be even easier.

      • Genghis says:

        5 Mar5 March 18:15

        I don’t really understand why it’s better for business expenses to pay in GBP using DCC. Surely you just take the GBP cost which hits the credit card statement as the expense (which is cheaper paying in local currency?)

• Joe says:

  5 Mar5 March 08:51

  I’ve had this too at the (now closed I think) IC Rome, where they swiped the card in GBP and got me to sign a folio on an A4 piece of paper with the Euro amount shown prominently in several places but the fact it was actually charged in GBP hidden in small print, so I didn’t notice until the transaction showed up on my card bill. Complained to hotel, IHG and Visa, and none of them did anything. Turned out to only cost £1.50 more than the IHG cards fees, but I had originally tried to pay with a supercard which was rejected, likely because the transaction was in GBP – obviously if I could have paid with that it would have been cheaper. It’s put me off IHG massively though – what’s the point in the brand if they aren’t going to stop their hotels scamming you? – so I’m switching to using hotels.com instead as you get 20% back and can prepay in your home currency, stopping these scams.

  It’s also worth noting AFAIK AmEx won’t let them charge your card in anything other than your home currency, so it’s frustrating they don’t offer foreign exchange fee free cards themselves in the UK (as then I’d just pay with AmEx and know they couldn’t DCC scam me).

  • Brian says:

    5 Mar5 March 09:20

    You’re wrong about the Amex. The Lloyds Amex, for instance, is designed specifically for foreign currency transactions.

    • Guru says:

      5 Mar5 March 12:05

      DCC is not available on AMEX, only visa and MC because AMEX want to retain the revenue they make from the transaction and they dont want that taken away from them.

      I agree that AMEX should have fee free transactions and am not sure why they dont offer that with the Platinum card, after all is costs a lot to have it.

      • Guru says:

        5 Mar5 March 13:45

        And by that I mean directly issued AMEX. 😉

    • Joe says:

      5 Mar5 March 13:27

      This isn’t offered by AmEx themselves though – I chose my words carefully 😉 after what I’ve heard about Lloyds customer service, I don’t want to use their card.

      • Gavin says:

        5 Mar5 March 18:17

        Had the card for 6 months, never had any issues with it or cause to interact with their cs

        • Mark says:

          6 Mar6 March 01:36

          If you do you’ll find their normal cs is useless for anything you couldn’t do yourself online. I also accidentally pushed the card slightly over the credit limit by a couple of pounds (my fault) which although I took corrective action within a day or two resulted in a cascade of charges and interest many times the amount I was over by some of which was incorrectly applied.

          I have to say though their official complaints channel was very responsive and quick to deal with issue, refunded the charges in full and some compensation on top less than a day after I raised it.

  • Mark says:

    5 Mar5 March 10:05

    In my experience DCC is rarely if ever offered on Amex transactions. I’m not sure whether it is possible but it certainly reduces the risk.

    As Brian says the Lloyds Avios Rewards Amex (£24 per year fee) does offer loading free transactions making it a good option if you’re getting value from the upgrade voucher to justify the annual fee.

    • Talay says:

      5 Mar5 March 10:47

      It certainly is at Boots in AUH airport as they scammed the women in front of me and I told them not to even think about it with me,.

  • Richmond says:

    7 Mar7 March 09:30

    “I’ve had this too at the (now closed I think) IC Rome, where they swiped the card in GBP and got me to sign a folio on an A4 piece of paper with the Euro amount shown prominently in several places but the fact it was actually charged in GBP hidden in small print, ”
    —

    I had exactly the same happened in Hilton in Mainz. Folio showed amount in Euro, I never paid by card in terminal, they just charged my card. Then days later I noticed very small print that my card was charged in £. I complained and was totaly ignored.

    I always ask before payment to be charged in local currency. I used Nationwide card which has no fx fee.

• Esperluette says:

  5 Mar5 March 09:05

  I have also been caught out on the PayPal site where one gets offered a choice of home versus local currency. My Halifax fx free card is what I want to use , in local currency,but the screens are awkward and I have been unable to use local currency on a couple of occasions when I was expecting the very small print option to appear.
  Raffles and fellow readers ,do you know if the PayPal conversion rate is much worse than the MasterCard one?the transactions involved were small and I could not tell the difference , specially after a few minutes of fx fluctuations.
  Seems like a super complaint by which is needed for institutionalised scamming!

  • Mark says:

    5 Mar5 March 09:50

    MasterCard has fixed daily rates which you can use to work out what you should have been charged.

    https://www.mastercard.com/global/currencyconversion/

    For non DCC transactions you should see exactly these rates applied for the given settlement date on your Halifax Clarity.

    • Guru says:

      5 Mar5 March 11:53

      And the Visa one lets you know what it would be with your banks fees added, https://www.visaeurope.com/making-payments/exchange-rates

  • nerd. says:

    5 Mar5 March 12:28

    @Esperluette – I wrote a quick guide on how to setup PayPal to default certain cards to foreign currency if that’s what you’re looking for? (I recently had to pay a French accommodation provider by PayPal so added my Halifax clarity card to PayPal)

    See http://nerd.steveferson.com/2016/02/23/avoid-paypal-foreign-exchange-fees/

• Mark says:

  5 Mar5 March 09:46

  DCC is also one of my pet hates. I suggest a one star negative review on TripAdvisor calling them out for overcharging (which is effectively what it amounts to, worse still it is deliberately hidden overcharging). If they refuse to refund, after making a fuss at the time I also dispute the transaction and request the difference to be refunded by the card company. Even if it is a few pence it’s the principle.

  The worst bit is retailers are being encouraged to ‘offer’ DCC as an additional revenue stream. No wonder some them ‘forget’ to give you the choice or claim to have machines that can’t.

  • Callum says:

    5 Mar5 March 12:34

    In my experience, ignorance about DCC is as prevalent amongst cashiers as it is amongst the general public. While I’m sure some of them are deliberately scamming you, I’d wager most don’t think they are. Many I speak to (in less touristy areas than upmarket hotels) are genuinely confused when I say I’d rather be charged in the local currency and had no idea that DCC charges you more.

    I also met a few small business owners (who I knew a little beforehand so was confident they weren’t lying) in Australia who were specifically told by the Travelex reps who sold them the machines that it’s better for the customer to use DCC.

    • Sussex bantam says:

      5 Mar5 March 14:56

      I used to be the finance director of a set of retail stores which operated in airports. Barclaycard actively sold DCC as a way for us to make more profit by overcharging our customers. They literally pointed out how to set artificially low exchange rates and presented us with a business case showing increased profits

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.