Travellers Cheque Card

[Deleted User]

Hi Everyone,,

Halifax have brought out a new card - the American Express travellers cheque card. Apparently, you pay £20.00 to buy it, charge it up with min £200.00 max £3000 converted to EUROS or USD. You pay a small fee when it expires at the end of 3 years and you are charge a fee every time you withdraw money from an ATM machine. Incidentally, if you need both USD and EUROS, you will need 2 cards - presumably at £20.00 each.

Sounds like a good and secure method for taking money when travelling abroad, but is it an expensive way? I'm rather tempted. Any comments would be much appreciated.
Thanks to all of you

hothothot_3

I got the card for free, the offer was that you load £700 on and you then get £50 and the card at no charge. There are lots of deals on this card to promote it, so If I were you I would shop around. hope this helps.

bob_builder_2

I thought this was a good idea until I realised that you paid a charge every time you used it to take your money out - this was before I realised you had to pay £20 for the card in the first place!

As far as I can see, it has no benefits over a Nationwide FlexAccount card (which you can load up with money before you go on holiday) but costs a lot more! Plus, if you have money left on it when you return you have to pay another fee to convert it back to GBP, whereas the Nationwode account is still in GBPs so you can just transfer the money out again (maybe into the linked eSavings account to earn more interest).

P.S. I would imagine more ATMs accept the Nationwide Visa or Cirrus card than accept an AMEX card.

grumbler

Some more negative information on this card:

Electron visa, or traveller's cheques?

American Express travel card

[Deleted User]

Thank you for all your replies. Seemed like a good idea at first, but it sounds like a very expensive way to take money abroad. I have lost interest. This is a wonderful site to bounce ideas around.

inmypocketnottheirs

An aside to the question posed but following on from an above post. Has any one used a Nationwide flexaccount card in the US. If so what was the availability of cirrus machines to withdraw?

grumbler

I have not been to US, but many others used Nationwide cards there without problems. AFAIK you can use Cirrus card with any ATM with Mastercard logo:

Mastercard/Cirrus ATM Locator

BTW Nationwide debit card is Visa.

Niteflyer

inmypocketnottheirs wrote:

An aside to the question posed but following on from an above post. Has any one used a Nationwide flexaccount card in the US. If so what was the availability of cirrus machines to withdraw?

Depending on what state you are visiting (not that it matters really) I lived in NY for over 3 years and returned home to UK 4 years ago and from memory ALL the ATM's I used accepted CIRRUS, I only remember because the basic ATM card I had at the time was a CIRRUS card

Hope this helps.

Matt

bob_builder_2

There have only been a few places I have found where ATMs do not accept both Visa and Mastercard branded cards. Dublin being one of them, where the banks either accept one or the other. The other being Gibraltar where NatWest accepted both and was on the Link network (so accepted any UK card) but Barclays was not on Link and only accepted Visa!