Comparison shopping for travel currency

Travelling to foreign countries is fun; exploring is what kiwis do.

Some of your trip costs can be prepaid, and much of what you will spend can be charged to your credit card. In fact travel cards are increasing in popularity as well. These are debit cards, pre-loaded with foreign currency, and are a great innovation.

But despite all this convenience, nothing beats having some travelling cash with you. And most people stock up at the airport, or make a quick, rushed visit to their bank branch just before they take-off.

But are you getting a good deal?

In fact, when the bank loads up your travel card, are you getting a good deal then as well?

How to know?

All the banks have rate boards displayed in their branch windows, so in theory you can compare. But that is far from convenient, and those rate boards don't tell you the effect of fees.

What you need to do is check rates and fees out on-line, before you go to the bank. But if you forget to do it then, you can always ask your teller to look on their browser for our tool - most banks give their front-line staff access to interest.co.nz, because it is a key tool for them to stay on top of the competitive banking rate environment.

And you can now, in one simple place. Use this tool here,

or go to this page here >> https://www.interest.co.nz/Calculators/buying-foreign-currency where all rates are always up to date because we scrape the banks website every few minutes.

In a spot test at 2pm, Friday, January 14, 2011 we found that at that time, the best banks to buy from were Westpac or BNZ, and the second best bank was always ASB. ANZ or National never were in the #1 or #2 position, and were clearly the most expensive places to buy. Sometimes the differences were small, other times you could save over $40 by buying at the right place.

Here are the results of that spot test.

The savings listed in this table are after comparing the exchange rate each bank uses, and deducting their fees (which vary depending on how much you are buying). It is the difference between the highest and lowest cost. The institution listed had the lowest cost, including fees.

(Update)
And to prove the point that these rates move a lot, here is the same spot test as at 10am, Saturday, January 15, 2011.

In this update, ASB was the second best in most cases, and the National Bank the most expensive - which seems odd, given that the National Bank and ANZ have the same owner.