Name and address for holiday money?

Why bother buying holiday currency here? It's a rip-off, your giving them 5% or more hidden in the rate. Withdraw from cashpoints abroad, much cheaper particularly if you use Nationwide. And no pathetic UK "money laundering" questions.

Good advice there about using an ATM card, especially from Nationwide. However, that still doesn't get around the money laundering issue because you would have had to provide proper identification and address details to obtain the ATM card in the first place.

Chris

I recently needed some US$ and some (Barbados) BDS$ from Thomsons.

Now, it happens that BDS$ is tied to the US$ at the rate of 2:1, so when they quoted me a rate US$1.33 per £, I expected to get around BDS $2.66 to the pound. Instead I got BDS $2.15!

And when I asked about the buying rate (change back to sterling) it was about $3.30 -- more than 50% difference between buying and selling rates! And I thought 15% between buying and selling Euros was bad enough...

They said it was because Barbados had an 'exotic' currency, although they also had plenty of stock of it...

And in Barbados itself, buy/sell rates for sterling at a bank was $2.82/$2.95, about a 4% variation. So for anyone going, just take sterling in paper money.

but they could slip the details to their mate - the one with the stripey jumper and a bag labelled Swag in the knowledge that you'll be away from home shortly.

True, but you only do it the once, not every time you get some cash.

Yup - it's the same in most countries with a minor currency, changing money there is usually very reasonable. Mind you practically anywhere is better than here in the UK.

The Nationwide are shortly to start charging a fee for outside of Europe usage according to Martin Lewis's site.

Yes, I noticed the press release which said they'd pass on VISA's charges, I guess this is what the new fee is for. But according to Martin Lewis's site it'll only be 1%, which on the interbank rate is still probably the best value way to obtain foreign currency.

By Europe, do they mean the geographical area or the EU, for which "Europe" is often incorrectly used as a synonym?

I'm off to Ukraine shortly. In Europe, but not the EU.

BobC

Perhaps they mean the zone in which the Euro is the adopted currency unit.

I wouldn't put it quite as strongly as that. Many words have different meanings. Why should "Europe" not? It's no worse than using "America" as a synonym for the USA. Erm, OK, it's bad. :-)

Nah, I don't think the traditional definition of Europe would include the Ukraine. Anything part of the former USSR would not have been deemed to be Europe, notwithstanding that many would consider the Europe/Asia boundary to be the Urals.

Looks like you're out of luck. List of countries :-

Chris

I see the Nationwide site doesn't actually use the word "Europe", it appears to be Martin Lewis who has added this bit. I think the Martin Lewis definition of "Europe" must be "certain places on the earth's crust"!

BobC

What about the likes of Latvia and Estonia which were previously part of the USSR, and are now part of the EU?