Money Matters

Thirty years ago, on our first trip to the Netherlands, my husband, Ed, and I were tired from a long day of travel, needed a place to stay and did not want to go into Amsterdam and fight the evening traffic. We discovered nearby Naarden-Vesting.

That time, we stayed in a small pension above a bar/restaurant that also served as a community hall where the locals congregated in the evenings. We’ve never forgotten the warmth and hospitality of the residents of Naarden-Vesting, so, when planning our April-May ’12 trip to Holland and Belgium, we knew we wanted to return to Naarden.

There was a request for alternative affordable places to stay (July ’12, pg. 67), so here are several that I’ve used in Europe in recent years.

FRANCE — Hôtel Reine Mathilde à Bayeux (23 rue Larcher, 14400 Bayeux, France; phone [33] 02 31 92 08 13, fax 92 09 93), in the Normandy region. €58 (near $72) for a double room in May ’11.

The excellent article about traveling by train from Vladivostok to Munich (July ’12, pg. 46) at a cost of $10,649 might lead some readers to believe that taking the train across Siberia is beyond their reach. It can be done much more cheaply, however. I traveled with a friend, Bob Geiman, from Beijing to Moscow in 2011.

In early May, the weather in Ulaanbaatar was cold and windy at times, with light snow flurries, but in Siberia it was perfect. We found the train not at all crowded in second class.

As someone who takes advantage of the Capital One no-foreign-transaction-fee credit card, I was excited to read from many sources in the September ’12 issue (page 38) that Capital One had a high-yield money market account with a debit/ATM card with no foreign transaction fee.

I went online but could find no way to apply for such an account, so I called Capital One and was informed that Capital One had purchased ING a couple of months previously, and Capital One no longer offers such an online account.

The central bank of Myanmar and several private banks have begun installing ATMs in preparation for a nationwide network. Currently, the ATMs work only with accounts from Myanmar member-union banks, but the government is negotiating with Visa and MasterCard to bring international banking by mid 2013.

Joellyn Ross of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, asked for recommendations of ATM cards that can be used in other countries without incurring exorbitant foreign-transaction fees. Subscribers’ selections and advice appear below.

Before you travel, it’s always wise to check with your financial institutions about charges you will incur when using an ATM in a foreign country. There are three types of charges to be aware of.

In Ireland in June ’12, my wife and I ran into a new phenomenon regarding credit cards — new for us, at least.

At the train station in Bucharest, Romania, in October ’00, my friend George and I were exposed to a scam similar to that in which another ITN reader and his friend lost $100 each at the same station (May ’04, pg. 11).

We arrived from Moldavia early in the morning, tired, hungry and with no local currency. The McDonald’s restaurant in the station refused American dollars.