Originally Posted by
Majuki
Sure. It's like Aruba. (I'm not using the Maldives as an example because to my knowledge there's no way to pay in MVR at the resorts. In Aruba you could always present a local card or cash in AWG.) However, in the case of Aruba hotel bills are presented in USD. Any DCC would be top of the USD amount. In this case the quoted price at booking and the price at checkout (which matched the price at booking) were both USD. The folio I was given for review at checkout was MXN. I have two questions:
1) If the booking price and credit card transactions are natively in USD, why provide the hotel bill in MXN instead of USD?
2) Would any DCC, if present, be on top of the USD price, not the MXN price? That is to say if someone presents a EUR, GBP, or CAD card and the transaction had DCC would the conversion happen off of a USD price?
In most countries the charges eventually must be logged in local currency for tax and accounting purposes.
So if a hotel in Mexico takes $1000USD its bank will convert it into MXN at whatever the rate is that day.
But here is where they are dishonest in my view. Often the amount you see on the final bill in MXN is converted at an inflated rate and then, to make matters worse, they have the audacity to then ask you if you want to pay in USD (yet another exchange... and possible DCC). So yes, you could end up with an inflated bill in MXN and then, on top of that, charged for the convenience of being billed in USD.
It's really fraudulent.
What I recommend people doing is looking carefully at the bill and paying close attention to the conversion rate that is being applied. If the hotel wants to set its rates in USD- fine. When it comes time to check out I pay the official rate- more or less (I am not going to argue about a delta of 1%). But I refuse to pay the hotel for their internal exchange rate which can be often upwards of 10%.