Originally Posted by
Kremmen
xe.com claims to give an average inter-bank rate. If I'm comparing using cash at a money changer to travellers cheques from Amex to Visa, MC and Amex credit cards, I'm going to use a base point like xe.com. One might want to use MC and Visa's web sites to compare whether cards of that brand are reliably using their rates, but it doesn't make sense to use them in any other way.
Okay, yes, someone might want to use MC's website to compare whether cards of that network are reliably using that rate. That's the issue that I've talking about all this time.
The essential problem I have with your point is that it's a massive digression at best. The definition of a fee to me is something that is actually charged. If there's a MC "fee" and a counteracting rate, then there really is no fee. If Amex sells me travellers cheques and waives the fee, I don't care how big the fee is that I didn't actually pay. If I buy something that costs, at xe's mid-rate, USD100, I want to be able to make a decent value judgement as to which payment method to use. In the past, that would have been travellers cheques in some places/times and cash in others and credit cards in others. Now, it will almost certainly be a credit card, but depends on bonus rewards points, credit card surcharges, credit card minimums, etc.
Okay, you want to have practical implications of what we're talking about. That's a fair enough point. But what I don't think what I said was a digression.
The ideal situation would be to find a bank that both uses MC's regularly lower rates
and doesn't pass on the ~1% fee. That's entirely possible to find, but it would be more difficult to find without knowing which cards do what.