A lot of travel web sites include currency converters -  well, we don’t! The simple reason is that currency converters do not reflect what you will pay for your holiday if you are brave enough to book something overseas rather than through a licensed UK tour operator. And apart from the insecurity of not knowing quite what your holiday will be, there is also no way of knowing what your holiday will cost when you come to pay for it several months later with exchange rate fluctuations. And remember the US and NZ dollars for example have both changed by about 10% over the last year

A currency converter is really nice little trick to make you think something is cheaper than it really is!

Currency converters work on the bank rate for currencies. This is a LOT better than you or we can get when we want to transfer money or pay by credit card in a foreign currency. In our experience the rate you will pay is on average 4-5% worse than the currency converter rate (‘commission free’ has to be paid for somehow, banks don’t do anything for nothing, you know that!). If you don’t believe me, call up your bank or credit card company and check their rate.

Alternatively, check online with a popular currency converter, www.XE.com/ucc/  and then with American Express public rates, https://www.fx4you.com/uk/lhr/default.cfm

A couple of examples from 05 Oct 2007

NZ dollar XE.com 2.6880 (what you think you will pay)
NZ dollar Amex 2.5593 (what you will actually pay)

US dollar XE.com 2.0358
US dollar Amex 1.9524

Euro XE.com 1.4424
Euro Amex 1.3802