Originally Posted by
JEFFJAGUAR
However, if you ever read some of the literature, you will see how they consider dcc to be a service to the customers who now knows exactly how much something costs in a currency they understand. And how wonderful it is for somebody on an expense account n submitting his or her diary for reimbursment. And finally it is now dcc that's scamming the populace. It's a serve and it's the greedy banks who now charge the 3% ftf that are the scammers.
The reimbursement case is the only case where DCC might be helpful. Otherwise it's as useful as useful as spam is to email.
One of the things really helping DCC is people not knowing where their exchange rates come from anyway. Even if DCCed, few realise it and think (in the HK case) that it's their HK issuer bank to blame.
Coincidentally it really helps one of the business mainland China is really trying to push down our throat - Unionpay. Unionpay has none of the DCC crap and has nil foreign currency conversion fee (even if its exchange rate is not nearly as good as Visa's) (the HK variant of Unionpay cannot be used without card being present so there is no foreign transaction fee to speak of). So thank you Visa and MC, you've just made us accept the warm (smothering) embrace of our mother country whenever we go abroad.
Foreign transaction fee (without conversion) is another bank rape. We're starting to feel the pain here - not only Mastercard (where it is a reimbursement of a Mastercard association fee) but for Visa as well (which is pure bank profit).
I've set up a foreign merchants list on hongkongcard.com to identify which merchants charge offshore, such as BA Avios redemption GB
http://www.hongkongcard.com/forum/fo...w.php?id=11968