Originally Posted by
1kBill
So it's back to traveler's checks for me.
Me too, unfortunately. The banks seem to give quite good rates for exchanging t-cheques. Since I can get them from my bank for basically no fee, it'll be worth it to go back to t-cheques. When you take the bank's 2.5% forex fee and slap on another $4 per transaction, the hit is over 3.5% when withdrawing 10,000 baht. To take the same hit on a t-cheque, the banks would have to shave more than one full baht off the interbank exchange rate, and it's usually more like .3 baht at the most, which equates to a 1% hit. I was willing to pay the extra to my bank for the convenience factor, but this makes it totally uneconomical.
If a lot of people start doing this, we'll see how the Thai Bankers Association likes paying people to deal with the hassle of t-cheques.