I thought so too, until I found out that not only does PayPal DCC Discover, it's forced DCC. Apparently Discover allows them to offer DCC without an opt-out option.

In fairness, the staff member processing your payment often doesn't have a clue what's going on. This is probably especially true of restaurant staff (collecting your payment is only a small part of what they do).

Is PayPal the only case of DCC with Discover?

My assumption is that most staff members are clueless when it comes to DCC. A proprietor might have more of an idea of what's going on, but I imagine the cashiers largely don't know how bad of a deal it is.

I forgot to include the form before: http://goo.gl/forms/u1WjMjhDRa Please use this to submit new information. Agreed. Updated.

Adding compliance info is tricky, but I've added a related question to the form.

Do we have any datapoints for Latin America (other than Mexico), Africa (other than Zimbabwe), the Caribbean or Pacific Islands? If so, please use the form above to submit. Thanks.

Some people, believe it or not, want DCC because for some idiotic reason they want to get everything priced in their home currency.

That's been the official value proposition from the inception of dcc, which has been persistently pushed through the entire value chain, so it's not surprising that people take the bait.

I must have missed that. Visa is the worst of those three on average. (See Forex discussion.)

We had some informal discussion about it on this thread about a year ago. There was no rigor around our experiment other than transactions using AmEx in a similar time period/posting date than Visa/MC seemed to use a slightly more unfavorable rate. All of these data points were within the margin of error of ±1% and all were much better than any DCC offered.

Could it be that many of these people are on business so aren't footing the cost themselves?

About a year ago there were hardly any 0% FTF Amex cards, so I guess data points would have been thin on the ground. ±1% is huge, when we're talking about MC being at the mid-rate, Visa being 0.4% (2014) to 0.7% (2015) above and Amex being somewhere between MC and Visa.

Any possibility that the current world economic situation's making Visa's forex rate choices worse? That thread also mentioned that Visa/MC are near equivalent in countries whose currencies seem to be tightly controlled (e.g. China).

Anything is possible, but I assume Visa's choices are to make more money and screw over customers, just like DCC.

Making blanket statements about "use issuer X" is a poor idea; the discrepancy between rates differs significantly depending on your currency. Sometime after my last trips to Japan and India, I did research and discovered that V was better in Japan and MC was (.1%) better in India. A later trip, V was better in India than MC. I think on average it all evens out in the wash, but if your international travel is restricted to one country that's always better, then obviously you should always care about that.

My figures come from over 100 transactions across 8 currencies including some of the most commonly used non-US currencies, GBP, EUR and AUD. Others in that thread have reported similar results. If you know exceptions, by all means point them out.

It does not "even out in the wash". Better to look up Visa's rates on their web site and compare to interbank rates on xe.com or oanda.com yourself rather than making such a ludicrous claim. On my data, Visa is worse and very consistently so. Worse mean. Worse maximum. Worse minimum. In transactions with identical date and currency, pr(Visa betters MC by >0.2%) = 0 while pr(MC betters Visa by >0.2%) is over 90%.