Travel Money Card

A travel money card is a card you use abroad that either holds foreign currency you loaded in advance or converts your own as you spend, without the foreign transaction fee a standard bank card adds. The same product is sold as a currency card, a prepaid travel card, a multi-currency card and an international travel card.

The mechanics are the same whichever name it carries. You hold a balance, that balance is spent or converted when you tap the card, and the exchange happens inside the card provider rather than being handed to your bank to price. What varies between products is when the conversion happens and what the provider takes for doing it, and those two things account for almost every difference in what a trip actually costs you.

There are two families. A prepaid card is loaded with a chosen currency before you leave, at that day's rate, and spends down that balance while you travel — the rate is locked, which protects you from a falling rate and denies you a rising one. A multi-currency card holds your home currency and converts it at the point of sale, usually at or near the interbank rate; accounts of this kind from Wise, Revolut, Starling and their equivalents in other markets work this way. Neither is better in the abstract. Prepaid suits a fixed budget in one country; converting as you go suits several countries, or a trip where you would rather not guess the total in advance.

The fees are rarely in the headline rate, and this is the part worth reading twice. Standard debit and credit cards commonly add a non-sterling or foreign transaction charge in the region of one to three per cent, which is the cost a travel card exists to remove. What can quietly replace it: a conversion spread at weekends or on thinly traded currencies, an ATM allowance that is free only up to a monthly cap, an inactivity fee on a prepaid balance left dormant, and a charge to move an unspent balance back at the end. Check each of those before you check the advertised rate. Separately, a terminal will often offer to bill you in your home currency — that is dynamic currency conversion, it is priced by the merchant rather than by your card, and declining it is almost always right.

Before choosing one, work out which of these you actually need: the currencies you will spend in and whether the card holds them natively; the free ATM allowance set against how much cash that country really runs on; whether a physical card arrives in time, since some are app-first; what happens if it is lost mid-trip and whether a backup exists; and whether the balance sits under a deposit guarantee, because a prepaid balance and a bank deposit are not the same thing legally. A no-fee card you cannot replace in the country you are standing in is worse than a slightly costlier one you can.

None of this removes the case for carrying some cash, and none of it makes a card the whole of a travel budget. It settles one line of it well. Where two people are splitting costs, the card each of you pays with matters far less than agreeing the method first — see splitting trip costs without resentment — and where you are sizing the trip as a whole, the card belongs in a travel budget alongside currency exchange for the cash portion.