BTW, if anyone remembers what happened to me in Shenzhen, I wrote about the issue in a survey and noted that the desk clerk choosing for me was not how it was supposed to go. The general manager actually e-mailed me back on that particular issue.

In short, the response went along the lines of "we're sorry for the inconvenience, we will relay your concerns to the desk staff, our Visa/MC card terminals always allow the customer to choose their payment currency, but we always recommend that customers paying with foreign-currency cards choose DCC to avoid exchange rate fluctuations".