In October 2019, I booked back-to-back, 8-day tours in Italy with the British company Travelsphere (Unit P, Welland Industrial Estate, Valley Way, Market Harborough, Leicestershire, LE16 7PS, U.K.; phone +44 1858 415 128, www.travelsphere.co.uk).
Scheduled for September 2020, the first trip was to the island of Elba (from where my maternal grandparents emigrated to America in 1907), and the second trip included the Cinque Terre on Italy’s northwestern coast.
In the letter “Watch Credit Card Statements” (March ’20, pg. 24), a subscriber wrote that he handed over his credit card to a waiter in a taverna in Greece for a few minutes and later discovered that a fraudulent charge had been made during that time.
Even though an incident like that cannot be prevented, you can contact the bank that issued your credit card and request that a notification be emailed to you whenever your card is charged over a certain amount or whenever a charge is made online or whenever an international charge is made.
On a cruise my husband and I took aboard the Norwegian Star (leaving Venice, Italy, Sept. 8, and returning Sept. 15, 2019), my husband and I traveled to Montenegro, Greece, Croatia and back to Venice.
For a day trip to Dubrovnik, Croatia, we were told by the ship’s staff that we didn’t need any local currency. However, I’d suggest getting at least $10-$15 in kunas because if you want to use a public restroom, you do need local currency.
About to join a cruise-tour in Greece, on Oct. 1, 2019, I had lunch at a taverna on Adrianou Street in the Monastiraki area of Athens. The restaurant was in a row of similar tavernas located nearly opposite the entrance to the Ancient Agora.
My wife, Susan, and I took a group tour through the Caucasus in September 2019 and wanted to share a problem we had in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Many local businesses indicated that they accepted Visa and Mastercard, but when we went into a tourist office in Baku’s Old Town and attempted to use a credit card to book a private tour, our cards were declined; we tried two Visa cards, one from Chase Bank and one from Bank of America. Luckily, we had enough local currency to pay for this tour.
Zimbabwe banned the use of foreign currency in transactions on June 24 while reintroducing physical Zimbabwean dollar bills.
Zimbabwe has struggled with maintaining its own currency, dropping the previous Zimbabwean dollar in 2009 due to hyperinflation and making multiple foreign currencies, including the US dollar, South African rand and Chinese yuan, official currencies. At that time, one US dollar was worth 35 quadrillion Zimbabwean dollars.
In his letter titled “Protecting a Bank Account from Theft” (July ’19, pg. 38), Stanley Mui wrote about precautions he uses when traveling with both debit and credit cards. We use a Bank of America Travel Rewards credit card as well as a Bank of America debit card. Bank of America has a couple of excellent security protections for their cards.
After years of hyperinflation, Zimbabwe got rid of its currencies in 2009, instead relying on currencies of other nations, primarily the US dollar and South African rand. In October 2016, it began printing its own “US” dollars, colloquially called “zollars,” which were traded 1-to-1 with actual US dollars. On Feb. 20, 2019, Zimbabwe stopped printing zollars and introduced the first currency of its own since 2019, called Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) dollars.
I want to share with ITN readers how I save on ATM fees.
First of all, I never use a currency-exchange desk — either at the airport or in the city — because of the unfavorable exchange rate and fees. Besides, ATMs are ubiquitous.
I always travel with two debit cards that do not incur a foreign transaction fee (FTF): a Charles Schwab Visa debit card and a Fidelity Cash Management Visa debit card. There are a lot of other banks that offer no-FTF debit cards nowadays.
