Originally Posted by
seawolf
There is no need to do that. MasterCard charged 1.087175. The rate that date was 1.08428. ¼ of a percent higher than market.
Visa was 1.7% higher than market. The point I'm trying to make here is it appears Visa is charging a fee more than 6.5 times more than what MasterCard is charging.
I added links to both Visa and MasterCard exchange rate lookup to the wiki and performed a spot check on about a dozen 2015 dates between USD and EUR. Visa is consistently higher than MasterCard. You pay about $0.01 to $0.02 USD more for each EUR you buy with a "no-transaction fee" Visa vs. a no-transaction fee MasterCard.
If you have a cards from both issuers, MasterCard is the way to go.
March 7 was a weekend day and Euro had a sharp decrease in value in March 6 (from 1.103 to 1.084). Since March 7 was a weekend day, effective currency exchange rates is usually picked from a time at previous business day and is kept about constant during the weekend. It seems that Visa has selected the most unfavorable rate and Mastercard has selected a favorable mid rate (or perhaps a rate based on the exact time of transaction). Such drastic changes in currency exchange rate are rare to happen for stable currencies, thus the difference between Visa and Mastercard rarely matters. But if somebody is making a transaction in countries with volatile exchange rates, the difference between Visa and Mastercard may be worth considering.