I suspect the delay in posting the charge resulted in the lower FX rate....sort of how, when you do a chargeback on an international charge, you may actually lose money since the refund is issued at whatever the current rate is, not the rate that was in effect when you made the initial charge.

Yes, that was exactly my thought -- as if the bank was expecting that momentary spike, and used it to tack another $5 to my bill. For retail customers the difference is too small to bother, but for the banks this can add up to make a difference. Btw, I'm aware that the FX market is very liquid and can not be easily manipulated over the long term. But brief spikes happen all the time, and may be artificial in nature.

Not recent. They've been doing this since ten years ago https://www.hongkongcard.com/forum/show/3939?page=3 #27

Isn't that fee illegal unless the fee also is charged when you select to use DCC? It would be interesting to see what the banks would say if you request a chargeback of the fee.

Try the Bankomat brand in Sweden, owned by the big banks. I only have SEK-denominated cards so I don't see DCC, but I've sometimes seen receipts thrown on the ground where it says that someone has accepted DCC to convert the money into some other currency like EUR or CHF or NOK or whatever.

Can't you just point a camera at the screen and document that you weren't given an option to choose a currency and then request a chargeback from your bank? I think that the most efficient way to fix the problem is to request a chargeback whenever it happens as chargeback fees are very high and act as an incentive to the merchants to comply with the rules. What happens if you use a multi-currency card like Revolut and you only have CHF on the card? If they still use DCC then I suspect it's quite easy to get a chargeback as they both got the card's local currency wrong (it's CHF as your other balances were at zero but they thought it was some other currency) and because you aren't allowed to use DCC on multi-currency cards.

I remember seeing 250 SEK on a payment terminal in Copenhagen, then seeing it posting as 200 SEK after I declined the DCC offer. 25% must be the worst I've ever seen. Usually it's around 5-10%.

One would do those things only if they cared. I was in Zurich for a day as a forced layover. Found the city ugly, and hated its vibe. Did not really care about 1 extra EUR on a train ticket, and planned to never set foot in that wretched canton. On the list of features I disliked about Zurich and wanted to document, DCC wouldn't even make a footnote.

Zurich ugly? Boring yes.
But perhaps you need to be stuck in Bucharest next time 😎

ATMs can charge a transaction fee with and/or without DCC so I'm not exactly sure what your question is. I was intending to say that I used a Euronet ATM which charged a transaction fee, and I declined DCC. I was reimbursed the ATM transaction fee at the end of the month by Schwab, so the fact that the ATM charges such fee is moot.

even for co-branded amex cards ??? or maybe i have to check the T&C of the amex i have

The acceptance agreement is between merchant and AMEX. Co-branded AMEX would be covered as it will settle thru AMEX network.

Thanks , and does this agreement cover ATMs ? or its another story ?

To my dismay, DCC is much more prevalent in Poland than it was before. Most if not all terminals show DCC, it is easy to avoid and use local currency and if it is managed by the cashier they will always ask, but it is still there. All ATMs use it and the big difference I am seeing now is that it is asked on contactless transactions now, when it the past it was only insert or when authorization was required. A typical screen that you'll get looks like this:

I had an interesting one the other day--one of the main payment processors in the Dominican Republic offers DCC to all foreign cards. The terminals are customer-facing and it's extremely obvious how to decline (press 1 for DOP, press 2 for USD), so no problems there... but when I paid with a German card, it still offered to charge me in USD.

Even if more prevalent, it seems like a better situation than it was in the past where cashiers managed the terminals and didn't ask for currency selections. I don't care if it is ubiquitous as long as there is always an easy opt out available.

I haven't been around here in awhile (when I left, the malicious browser-hijacking ads had got so bad I just couldn't put up with them anymore), but with travel about to reopen I wanted to check out the DCC situation broadly. It's interesting watching how it changes. Ireland used to be one of the worst, but when I was last there just before Lockdown 1 (last February, I was in Dublin), I didn't see DCC once. But it looks like other countries have gone the opposite direction.

I wonder if it's cyclical - merchants and banks get this "brilliant" idea, then find it destroys their reputation and costs them more in chargebacks than they earn off of it.

Welcome back, and I was wondering what caused the DCC uptick in some locations and disappearance in others.

I haven't been doing many transactions not in USD, but the above reports show that places like Poland which used to not have an opt out or unwilling cashiers now gives customers the choice. The last time I was in the UK was about a month before things shut down, but I didn't see any DCC with my transactions. I was exclusively using my CSR with contactless on the card or my phone.

I was in Shanghai December 2019, but I only had one data point with no DCC. I mostly used Alipay's new tourist pass option which didn't have a credit card fee when it debuted (nor did it have DCC). The hotel was on an AmEx, so there was no data point there.