Originally Posted by
dvs7310
Depending on your credit card you are using, you actually may end up paying more by booking local due to foreign exchange fees that you wouldn't have by booking on your home country's site. In the OP's case, that wouldn't amount to much, but in the case of a long haul ticket costing $1k or $2k, the fees and exchange rate variance can be more than any POS savings.
I would never use a credit card that charges anything more than the inter-bank foreign exchange rate (same as in Bloomberg, Reuters, etc.) and no fees. But I realize that while those cards are easy to get in the US, in other countries you may not have a choice but be charged a bad F/X rate and/or a fee, in which case your advice (which is to compare the prices of your own countries to those of the country of departure) is sound.
In my case, where the difference was a whopping 15%, it was obviously a no-brainer for anyone to buy it from the country of departure, as I'm not aware of any credit card that charges you a combined F/X rate spread plus fees that are that high.