Originally Posted by
SK AAR
In my experience the airline IT systems doesn't use DCC - the exchange rates used are very close to market rates. It is the bank of the vendor that use DCC (and benefits from it). Only when paying manually for the ticket at the ticket office by swiping your CC, the device is likely to apply DCC and you have to insist that you are charged in local currency rather than letting the bank of the vendor convert the amount into your currency (I have tried that numerous times with TG in Thailand)
SQ's
web booking engine certainly does not use market rates when converting to a different currency. An example, I looked at just now:
SIN-BKK-SIN = $294 SGD, and currently $294 SGD = 164.23 GBP. Yet select GBP for payment on SQ website, it converts to 172.33 GBP, a mark up of almost 5%. I'm not sure what happens elsewhere, but in Singapore the conversion fee is around 3% for most cards. So this is 2% higher than paying with a CC in foreign currency.