Just an update that during a trip to Australia, only twice during the entire trip was DCC even prompted. Both retailers that asked had the same type of strange standalone terminal where you put the chip card in vertically whereas everyone else had a horizontal insert machine of varying types. I am sure it is a specific processor doing such evil deeds. The worse part is one of them was the SYD duty free. I was asked about DCC in these two cases, so I could pick AUD, but also to note those were the only two merchants who had normal casing on my Capital One statement as well (upper and lower) while every other charge uses the all caps (which is common for 90% of my US charges too).

Now AUS has other quirks like the allowance of merchants to charge a service fee (which I saw come up a number of times), and they are tap for *everything* including their stored value transit cards, amusement park tickets, hotels, passport e-gates, but I didn't have a good non-FTF tap card to use sadly. I only saw *one* unattended kiosk the entire trip that only took tap (it was a vending machine in the airport bathroom). All other kiosks took at least chip as well.

Because I was a good person and used a MC card, I was asked if they could Paypass (tap) my card. Obviously, nothing happened so they had to insert. I had a PIN card if needed, but signature card worked everywhere.

Rasheed