Originally Posted by
moondog
If they pull that on you without disclosing such, they're in deep doo-doo once you escalate things (i.e. you have grounds to execute a complete chargeback unless they play nice).
As long as you have enough USD income to cover expenses, it makes sense to use Schwab everywhere.
Well, whenever merchants are going to surcharge, they've always been very upfront about it before the transaction takes place...both in China and elsewhere in Asia (mostly SE Asia) where they do this. So it's not been an issue of sneakiness or attempted skullduggery. The ball is placed in my court to decide whether to use the foreign cc and pay the surcharge...or pay cash and avoid...or walk from the transaction entirely.
Frankly, I haven't found that it does any good to go on and on with them about how MC, Visa, etc. don't permit them to do this per their merchants' agreements. They'll just laugh and do what they want to anyway--this is developing Asia. As an individual, I don't have an effective club to stop this practice. The one time I tried to get a receipt that identified separately the base price and the cc surcharge, then followed up and tried to get a chargeback from the card-issuing bank, it was a big hassle and huge waste of time, as in the end they refused anyway. Not to mention expensive intl long distance phone call to try to pursue this. The after-the-fact chargeback strategy might work for those of you who are mostly travelling and spend a lot of time back in your home bank countries where you can straighten this out more easily, but it doesn't work for me. It's just easier to pay cash.
The DCC issue is a separate one entirely.