Lots of payments needed to be made whilst abroad

sa2688

Hello

I'm travelling to the Republic of Ireland in a few months to carry out some flying training for 6 weeks, each day I will need to make quite big payments (Around £1000 a day) obviously the local currency is Euros, is there a cheaper way for me to make these payments as I can imagine the fees & charges on these amounts each time are going to quickly become expensive. I have a Natwest credit card and debit card, is there something I can do to avoid these charges?

Thank you.

Ayr_Rage

Get yourself a bank account that offers a debit or credit card with no foreign fees.

eskbanker

https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/credit-cards/travel-credit-cards/ summarises options for consumer purchases in non-sterling currencies but it sounds like you may be making business purchases?  If you're spending £7K a week, you'd probably struggle to get a new card with anything like the credit limit needed to sustain that, unless you'd be paying it off regularly - is there any other route to make the purchases, e.g. invoices to your company?

username

Easiest way to avoid the FX markup is to get a travel credit card - your easiest once since you bank with Natwest is this travel reward card: https://www.natwest.com/credit-cards/travel-reward-credit-card.html
Is this travelling for work, and if so, why just not expense everything (fees included) or get them to provide you with one of their corporate credit cards?

There's loads of other options here: https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/credit-cards/travel-credit-cards/

Other ones that are not mentioned in the article are (I have these):

- The Halifax Clarity
- The Nationwide Members' Card (you must be a client of Nationwide to get this one)

If you are happy with the concept of app-only banks, then Starling, Monzo and Chase do fee-free spending and cash withdrawals to a certain amount whilst you're abroad. 

PRAISETHESUN

For credit card transactions, the options above are good. I agree you'll be unlikely to get a CC with a limit high enough to cover £1k/day for more than a couple of days at a time unless you are constantly paying it off. A lot of banks seem to be offering fee-free transactions for their debit cards these days - Chase, First Direct, Lloyds (from 14 April 25 for their Club accounts), and Virgin are the ones that come to mind. There are probably others. If you're paying by bank transfer, then you'll want to use a specialist currency conversion service. I use Wise, but there are others.

If there's the option to invoice expenses to someone else, then as above that's probably the best option.