... :rolleyes:

Oh come on, I've met many people who genuinely believe that outside the borders of the US everyone is either evil, impoverished, or both. There is a widespread belief that the US is some type of paradise that everyone else wishes they could be just like.

Now, being in rural Montana plays no small part in being around this, I'm sure. But seriously, hell, if there was a way to "DCC" tourists from other STATES, I'm sure they'd do it here. Especially to Californians. Add a 5% fee for using a California-issued credit card? I can name quite a few businesses I bet would sign on in a heartbeat to such a scheme.

Currency fees are still common outside the US though right? Or have non-US banks switched to FTFs too?

They are still common, but some banks are switching over to FTFs. The worst is that some issuers outside of the US will have rewards bonuses on foreign spend, and DCC doesn't count.

I'm just gonna wager a guess that those people you're referencing have no idea what DCC is, and wouldn't want to bother to implement it.

Fair point. I do think there'd be a hugely viable market around here for a POS system designed to detect Californian cards and automatically add a surcharge. And if you don't believe me come visit Montana.

She got her monthly statement, and the $10.82 transaction posted as NT$342. I'm assuming it used the 12/2 or 12/3 exchange rate with the 1.5% currency conversion fee. I still don't know why the pending transaction was a much higher amount.

I think I found a situation where DCC is actually the best choice. It has been announced US Soccer will play a game in Chile, out of curiosity I started browsing some hotels in Santiago and I am seeing extra terms and conditions where foreigners are exempt from Chilean sales tax, but you must pay in a currency other than Chilean Pesos.

So I am guessing the markup from DCC is probably less than the sales tax for the native currency.

I think that is the famous example used to justify DCC in all cases lol.

Apparently VAT is 19% there according to Google. :eek: Yeah, that's probably one of the only situations where DCC is actually a good idea.

Would DCC qualify for this exemption? The merchant receives the payment in the local currency, even in the case of DCC.

My understanding is that, yes, it's an option to pay with a card. I'm not sure if it's actually DCC'd or if it goes into a USD account.

Hate to get OT, but I (now) know what VAT is, and want to know why it is so high. And why hasn't the US adopted it?

In most other countries there is a value added tax (VAT) at a national level. The US only charges sales tax on a statewide level but not at a national level. The US hasn't adopted one because it would be difficult to implement on a state-by-state basis, and too unpalatable on a national level.

In Australia, it's hard to say for sure. How can that be? Some banks put FTF into their T&C years before actually implementing it and even then implement it with exceptions!

I doubt DCC is even the biggest reason for those banks. For years, the amount of online international shopping has been skyrocketing, but now quite a lot of international merchants are capable of charging in AUD. If your widget costs $10 on ebay from China and $50 in a local shop, the 3% FTF on the $10 transaction isn't going to affect your purchase choice, so there's a captive market for the banks to tap by charging a foreign transaction fee regardless of currency.

It really becomes a mess because there are also local companies (esp. online ones, such as ebay itself) that do their card processing in another country. This leaves customers paying an Australian company with an Australian card and getting hit with a FTF that they had no way to know about. ANZ Bank has a small list of merchants which their overseas transaction fee doesn't apply to, such as cruise lines and Tiger Airways (which processes all its payments in Singapore, even for its Australian subsidiary), but hits customers of many other businesses with the fee.

but if I travel to Chile for business, then my client can deduct IVA.

FTF is not always bad either-i.e. in the UK if cards operated on a FTF rather than non £ fee basis, I could pull EUR and USD at bank rate. Same thing with Canada and being able to pull out USD from a dual currency ATM at bank rate.

I may be wrong but I believe most FTF's apply to foreign currency AND foreign country transactions both.

I've heard this before.

But I'm sure London and Sydney can make Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles look like hell...

I've been telling people coming to USA that it surely ain't all paradise.

I've never been to Sydney. I love London and Los Angeles, but London more so. Chicago IS hell... (no offence, Chicago people...)

I wonder if there are just few enough foreigners at many local businesses that enabling DCC isn't financially justified?

I would think that they would check your passport to make sure you are a foreigner. Otherwise, any local resident could go to the bank and get some foreign currency to avoid the tax. But at any rate, since the hotel needs to specify the amount of the charge to the terminal before swiping a card, I don't think DCC would matter. The employee will probably decide whether you are eligible based on your passport or the appearance of your credit card.


I think that's the bottom line. Most parts of the US get few foreign visitors relative to the local population, compared to many other countries. However, that doesn't explain why merchants at airports and such haven't implemented DCC yet. Perhaps the acquirers don't find it feasible from their perspective.

But one of these cities doesn't have DCC at the airport. :D

Surely you went to the good parts of LA :D

Chicago's city center (I mean the part inside the loop) is quite nice. But just like LA, if you venture out, you can run into every sort of trouble, especially if someone goes south...

NYC on the other hand has more troubles in the center...

Melbourne Airport has DCC, I clearly remember.

London is quite nice that I've only encountered DCC a couple of times.

I doubt if DCC is implemented in the US, there would be any "scam" like practices like one can find in Ireland or China. It's like looking for legal trouble dead-on in a everybody-suits-everybody country...

The info we need to look at might be that how many acquirers there are in the US. For example in Australia, usually the acquirers are those big banks, so the number is limited. But if there are so many acquirers in the market, implementing DCC by one acquirer might not cover that many foreigners.

That's right on both accounts. I feel like a lot of this DCC behavior practiced in other countries would be ripe for a big class action lawsuit in the US (plus would even include those people who had made a purchase in the US with DCC and thus been passively ripped off.)

I don't have any data on acquirers, but it probably isn't like HK where you only seem to have Hang Seng, Global Payments, and Citibank. (...plus only a few others?)

I have never been to a place in the US where shopkeepers or bartenders will try to rip off tourists by overcharging compared to the real price. Sure, there are overpriced tourist traps, but they are overpriced for everyone.

On the other hand, overcharging tourists common practice in parts of other countries.

So, I think that you have this completely backwards.

If that's not common practice where you are we must live in two totally different Americas...

I saw the same terminals at DFS at SFO today as in GUM with the same 3% rate offered:

http://i.imgur.com/MbJo7Dnt.jpg

The interesting thing is that they have both the PRC and ROC flags there, but the characters for the ROC flag are simplified. :D

Since I had a USD card there was no DCC offer, but I imagine opting out would be simple like it was at HKIA. Two flags appear on the screen and you pick the one you want. You have full control over the selection, and it's fairly non-coercive as far as DCC offers go.

BTW, contactless won't prevent DCC, at least for Visa cards:

http://i.imgur.com/K6bGRe7.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/KHrmntG.jpg

But doesn't there have a to be a signature/PIN entered somewhere for DCC to take place? I think for contactless without a signature/PIN for a small purchase DCC isn't allowed. Otherwise, in a dispute, how can you prove that the cardholder opted in to DCC?

What a totally retarded thing it is..

Contactless is especially designed for fast purchases. I can pay contactless for 1$ (or, better say, 1.37$) which makes the process much faster than paying by cash. But have me trying to evade DCC will take couple seconds - giving me annoyed faces by other customers (and making it less probable that I'll use card next time) and eventually have me using just one single card for my purchases: Amex

Visa and Mastercard really seem to have one single target: Making Amex stronger with their retarded "lets scam the customer" ideas..

Apparently that's satisfied with a checkbox.

http://i.imgur.com/A74Q6AT.jpg

DCC general requirements:

http://i.imgur.com/hp5UnlM.jpg

This was mentioned a while ago, but I found out today that this is exactly what Uber does if you take a ride in a country other than your card issuing country. I took an Uber ride home from PVG airport and while the Uber receipt showed I was supposed to be charged 350 RMB it said in fine print "this transaction will be processed in USD". It just showed up on my AmEx as being processed from the US at a very good (0.1% off mid-market) exchange rate, neatly side-stepping the FTF my Costco AmEx charges.

Now THAT is a DCC rate I can get behind.

I saw Uber being promoted in my annual Shenzhen mattress run (Westin Nanshan this year) but I'm curious how they can collect from the customer outside China.

In this case, what is to prevent a dual USA (replace with any other nationality that allows dual nationality)/Chilean national from using their foreign passport from also avoiding the tax?

As I said, US is not totally paradise. A greater percentage of people in this country are really honest and kind, but being a country with hundreds of millions of people, there surely are bad guys.

The moment I arrived in this country about 10 years ago, I got ripped off by a Time Warner Cable installation guy, who told me I had to pay $30 to him and this would appear on my bill as a deposit. Surely it didn't.

Then I got ripped off by a tow-truck driver even none of my car and my friend's car were on his truck. We paid him $50 so he didn't tow, without a receipt.

I've come to almost all states where there are something that can attract tourists, and I've met all kinds of bad guys there. However, I would still say 99% of the Americans are very good. Bad guys are everywhere in the world.

Regarding business practices, I think US has some really tough laws to protect consumers. If you don't believe me, try getting some courtesy credit from a DCC transaction from a bank in China, and see whether they give a damn to customers... So, some bad merchants can scam a few tourists, but a big scam would always fail big when it is big enough.

These 专车 apps have already attracted enough attention of the government... I doubt how much longer they can exist in China. The foot soldiers (those Uber drivers) are gonna be crushed by anti-黑车 enforcement. Much easier to take those apps down than having to deal with the developer companies legally.

Is this DCC avoidable?

Even if people can dodge the tax using DCC, I think in a country like Chile, this loophole will lead to DCCs with mark-up as high as the tax. After all, it's not a country with a very developed free-market, is it?

Nothing, really. Since dual nationals have foreign passports and could easily have foreign credit cards, I don't see how this could be prevented other than by requiring a foreign utility bill or something like that.

I think this is key. It's also that companies enforce their policies. For instance, Visa and MC prohibit merchants from refusing to complete a transaction because the customer doesn't want to show ID with a properly signed card. There are some businesses who ignored this policy in the past but ended up dropping the ID requirement after a customer complained to Visa or MC. The same goes for minimum purchase requirements or imposing a credit card surcharge (where the law doesn't allow for such things).

I feel like there simply aren't the same protections overseas. There are a lot of merchants who don't seem to care about the policies of the payment networks, and this extends to DCC. You ask to be billed in local currency, and the response is, "Let's see what happens." (The merchant knows exactly what will happen.) Then the merchant gives you problems when you demand that the transaction be voided and run again without DCC.

I would say in the US that the cashiers would be a lot more willing to work with the customer in instances of DCC such that if any of us were to encounter it we would be able to opt out. There is a certain customer service oriented culture here that tends to do the right thing for the customer.

In the case of DCC at a restaurant in the US their motivation to help me would correlate with the size of tip that I would give. :D

Any official link to this policy?:confused: