Originally Posted by
JEFFJAGUAR
Originally Posted by
augustus21
The main culprit behind the international growth of DCC are Visa and MC. Both have been pushing merchants to buy into the practice. The argument is that a merchant using DCC is better than a merchant who doesn't accept plastic at all, but it remains entirely dishonest.
Some cities/countries are worse than others. I lived in Italy and rarely saw DCC used (with the exception of hotels, which often ask... I'm looking at you, Westin Excelsior). A week in Dublin, though, was DCC central. Nearly every merchant, except Trinity's bookstore, tried to get me to use it. A coffee shop didn't give me a choice and a call to Chase got the difference refunded. I quickly learned to say "charge me in euros" as I would hand over my credit card.
I'm not sure mc/visa had much choice in this. After all, they make substantial income on the 1% they charge for currency exchange transaction and I believe it's 0.8% or something for allowing acces to the international interchange system even if no currency exchange is involve.d. It is or seems to be waiving of these fees is hardly ever done outside the USA and in the USA some do waive these fees, some pass along the fees and some of the near criminal banks impose an additional fee to bring it up to 3%.
But in any event, somewhere in the back of my warped mind there seems to have been some kind of agreement somewhere prohibiting mc/visa from prohibiting dcc as I remember. Now why it wouldn't apply to Amex I can't answer (although most of the Amex cards have foreign exchange fees). As far as discover, they really don't have all that much of an international presence. I hear China all the time and that may be true but very few places in Europe, for example, still take Dincers Club where supposedly Discover is interchangeable with. And aren't North American diners club cards processed through the mastercard system? So I don't think mc/visa are the culprits here.
In China Discover is processed through UnionPay and is probably more widely accepted. Similar to how it is processed through JCB in Japan. I have no idea what that means for DCC however.