The days of "like cash" treatment of Traveler's Cheques are over. I recently tried to cash in a fairly large amount of Euro-denominated Traveler's Cheques in Germany, and four different banks insisted that they would not be able to exchange them for cash, but rather offered to deposit the checks to my accounts. The only place where I could get cash was an AMEX office -- and the procedure was far from fun & easy.

99.5% of the traveling public is better off without Traveler's Cheques these days. The list of acceptable uses of Traveler's Cheques is very short; it may include those who safely wish to carry cash of questionable provenance (and the tradeoff here is safety vs trackability), gamblers who would lose their winnings if they kept cash, but who miraculously are capable of walking out of a Casino with a wallet full of Traveler's Cheques, and youngsters who received some support from their grandparents.