DCC: Dynamic Currency Conversion (2017-2025)
 

I returned from Italy and didn't see DCC a single time in Rome, Florence, and Pisa. I did do a lot of contactless payments, which might have helped prevent it. However, a few of the usual suspects for DCC (duty free, airport hotel, and restaurants in tourist areas) didn't result in any DCC. It was likely an option at both of my hotels in Rome and Florence, but I didn't see it since I had used an AmEx to pay.

Both the Harrods and F&M shops at LHR T5 are still doing DCC, and I saw multiple people opting in. At least at Harrods the cashiers were asking for currency preference. When I said pound sterling the cashier actually reached over the counter and in a nanosecond had pressed cancel to opt out of DCC.

Last week in Sweden I saw DCC on most terminals. The SEK option was greyed out and on the left, the EUR in bright green on the right. It took a while for me to find the right spot to press to stay in local currency :mad:

My wife also asked me what this SEK/EUR thing was after she came back from shopping alone. She knew not to accept the EUR option and struggled to push the right buttons. It seems she did ask the cashiers who all insisted the end result was the same and that she should just accept EUR. :rolleyes: She didn't though. ^

Do you remember the procedure for refusing DCC? Did you have to press no/cancel? Were the terminals customer facing? It sounds as bad as Poland where the staff have been trained to get people to fall into the DCC trap.

As a side story, I found someone respond quickly, "Euro!" when offered at Harrods yesterday at LHR T5. In the customer's defense, if most of the customer's shopping is within the euro area then the person might be ignorant of DCC just like if you're coming from a larger country such as the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, or Japan. I tend to think people from places like Hong Kong are more likely to have encountered DCC in the past and respond appropriately. Pretty much everyone I talk to who's a seasoned international traveler knows about the DCC scam, but the occasional traveler does not. As I've said before, I've even have had a few people mention, "Yeah. It was great. I could pay in dollars!" :rolleyes:

I am also completely shocked at the number of people still bringing cash and going to bureaux de change or even at the hotels. In fact, at one of my hotels the reception clearly stated, "I would recommend using a cash machine if it's an option as the exchange rate is better." They weren't small sums of money either! I simply don't understand why people don't withdraw currency on arrival, especially since there are options - at least stateside - of doing so without fees and a 0% foreign transaction fee.

You had a field on the left with SEK with a dark grey box backgound (black text on dark grey) and the same sized box with a green background (black on green). Touching the dark grey box with the fingernail did the trick. The color scheme suggested EUR/DCC to be better. All customer facing.

This reminds me of my sister-in-law paying at stores in the US. Select YES for Australian Dollars:

http://i.imgur.com/mNjg7Mmt.jpghttp://i.imgur.com/QhDD6Eit.jpg

(Forever 21 and Kate Spade)

It's all configured to get people to select DCC without thinking but still being compliant enough for allowing those in the know to opt out.

With my chip&pin VISA I observed that card terminals with additional customer PIN pad offer the DCC option to the cashier after entering the PIN even though the PIN pad displays the amount in PLN only. In Poland be suspicious with English text on the PIN pad display, e.g. AMOUNT PLN 150 ENTER PIN and check carefully what the cashier is doing on his terminal after the PIN has been entered.

Ugh that is non compliant you entered your PIN for a different amount than you were charged. The networks need to get more serious about enforcement.

Were the cashiers ready to press to accept DCC or did they honor the choice/give you the option? I've read Poland is very hostile in this aspect. Cashier claim ignorance or play dumb, "Well, let's see what happens..." and they know exactly what the outcome will be. I agree with AllieKat that the payment networks need to step up enforcement with this issue.

That's interesting, I was also in Sweden last week and was positively surprised regarding DCC, it was not offered in any shops at all. It was only offered when withdrawing cash in the ATMs (Bankomat ATMs), and the text and choices were clear both for my German VISA (in German) and my Belgian MasterCard (in English, my preferred language of the card).

PayPal and Ebay have now stopped to worry about DCC (see https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/.../920926/page/8 ) . They are now charging people in their home currency without asking. :mad:

No, they dont offer DCC or not even know such thing. Again, these are all eateries frequent only by locals and the mainlanders.
More than one eateries actually told me, "we dont take Union Pay. It must be HKD." That is what I got from a local chain of mid-range banquet restaurants that is famous for their bargain period for breakfast that often has some really good dim sum combo at like 50% off. (稻香 - the Wanchai location above the Lee Garden is very good, not so much at other locations).
Even the very touristy Crystal Jade (翡翠拉麵小籠包) at IFC did not attempt DCC. They do have an attitude to mainlanders though as they mistook us being from mainland when assigning table. Had to talk to a manager to get things sorted. However, definitely not offered DCC option, nor automatically DCC our US-issued card.

I am talking about very Chinese-ish HKG eateries. None of them are Steakhouses - all of them are various Chinese foods - from big banquet restaurants for Dim Sum or Dinner, to the popular Tsui Wah chain. (翠華). My husband likes the Lamb chops there very much so we ate a few times at the 翠華 within 3 min walk from the HR TST - about as touristy location as you can get - NO DCC attempt whatsoever.

Not a single one attempted to DCC.
When I reiterated to the waitress / waiter when handing them my US-issued card I always asked them to bill in HKD. My brother told me not to worry more than one time that the restaurants will bill in HKD. We quite like the Cantonese banquet restaurant atop the Tin Hau MTR station. This restaurant is what I would term "Restaurant for the community" - it fills up around 7:30 every night with guests you know are from nearby. During the Mother's Day / Father's Day, Chinese Festivals, etc, the restaurant is full of extended families having a feast even though the prices generally go up 40% from normal days and all the "specials" were not offered. I was even scolded once by the older waitress when I asked to make sure it was billed in HKD - the 阿嬸 gave me a look, said LOUDLY, " If it is not HKD, what do you think?!" "WE DONT TAKE UNION PAY!"
I am just trying to tell you people, the eateries we go to, are VERY MUCH DIFFERENT from the restaurants you go to. Different preferences on the foods, and of course we dont much care for "atmosphere" - we only care for good foods at reasonable prices.
So there. It all depends on WHERE you go. Then in some places how you look and what language you speak, probably make a difference as well.

You can believe it or not I could not care less. We visited HKG 4 times in 2016, ate at enough restaurants whether only ourselves or with families, my US-issued CCs NEVER experience DCC. The only places are hotels where you do need to assert your choice and make sure they comply. They do comply even though the procedures often are not transparent and quite confusing.

Will report back on the upcoming trip during CNY period if I remember to drop by this thread after trip.

Now I would need to pay attention in Abu Dhabi and Dubai! Hardly any data on this thread or I have missed it.

I've never seen DCC in HK either. I did see it in AMS food court and Germany (Sixt, Hyatt DUS and Euronet ATM).

It's difficult to prove a negative. For instance, many of us often wonder if DCC is present in the US - it is - because there are few data points since the vast majority of people in the US are using USD cards. The one somewhat local place where percysmith and I ate in HK didn't have DCC, but that's one data point out of tens of thousands. The other two restaurants where we've eaten were outlined earlier in this thread and did have DCC, but both clearly had expat appeal. That doesn't take away from the fact that DCC can manifest in the most unlikely places. There was one clothing store in my wife's smaller hometown in Taiwan that had it even though the customers were all local.

I definitely expect it at duty free shops, hotels, rental cars, department stores, and restaurants catering to a foreign clientele, but DCC is not exclusive to these usual suspects.

We got this circular at work asking to avoid DCC :)

Just an update that during a trip to Australia, only twice during the entire trip was DCC even prompted. Both retailers that asked had the same type of strange standalone terminal where you put the chip card in vertically whereas everyone else had a horizontal insert machine of varying types. I am sure it is a specific processor doing such evil deeds. The worse part is one of them was the SYD duty free. I was asked about DCC in these two cases, so I could pick AUD, but also to note those were the only two merchants who had normal casing on my Capital One statement as well (upper and lower) while every other charge uses the all caps (which is common for 90% of my US charges too).

Now AUS has other quirks like the allowance of merchants to charge a service fee (which I saw come up a number of times), and they are tap for *everything* including their stored value transit cards, amusement park tickets, hotels, passport e-gates, but I didn't have a good non-FTF tap card to use sadly. I only saw *one* unattended kiosk the entire trip that only took tap (it was a vending machine in the airport bathroom). All other kiosks took at least chip as well.

Because I was a good person and used a MC card, I was asked if they could Paypass (tap) my card. Obviously, nothing happened so they had to insert. I had a PIN card if needed, but signature card worked everywhere.

Rasheed

The bank will usually be identified on the receipt and often on the terminal too. I've certainly seen some ANZ terminals that do DCC. It would be interesting to know who else.

SPG Amex is a good option but, being Amex, avoids the whole issue of DCC. (The first time I ever used mine successfully for tap was in Australia, as all the times to that point that I'd tried in the USA had failed.)

This experience generally accords with my visit down under last June/July. We were embarassed to bits by the number of times cashiers "plunk" our HKD cards against card terminals and us saying "err you're going to have to stick that into the terminal and have me sign for it".

Yep. It's amazing how short memories are as during my first trip to Australia - not that many years ago, I might add - everything was still swipe-and-sign. Now I have to proactively offer, "It doesn't have 'PayPass' " while searching my pockets for a pen. :)

I thought HK had contactless credit/debit cards? Or have the banks there decided to put nearly all their efforts towards ______ Pay like the American ones?

They didn't have overseas earn promos so we weren't carrying them in our travel wallets.

Actually the ones that had the overseas earn promos were in the process of being replaced but ours were still in the queue. On return to HK we promptly called the two banks and requested expedited replacement.

The only retailer that asked me about DCC in Australia was Uniqlo, last time I was there.

Amex acceptance is generally low. The places that charge CC surcharges also tend to charge more for Amex. In some cases there will be no surcharge for V/MC and a surcharge for Amex.

And yes, everyone taps. It's why the banks there just don't care about Apple Pay (not enough to give Apple a cut, anyway). The way they see it, they put in significant resources into contactless adoption (terminals, ads, etc) and Apple wants to piggyback off that and take their money because they're Apple. :)

There's also the part where the major Australian banks want the right to pass through to their customers whatever Apple charges them (so if Apple charges the bank 5c/transaction, the bank wants to charge the customer the 5c too). The bank's own app would likely be free to use as well as the physical contactless card.

Of course, Apple has never agreed to such a thing and isn't about to start now.

We'll see. Apple agreed to very different terms in the U.K. compared to the US.

Outside of the prime targets of hotels and airport duty free, I only saw it twice back in August, once at a merchant at Paddy's Markets (Haymarket) and at JB Hi-Fi. At JB Hi-Fi, the terminal was under our control the entire time. (I was guiding a friend through a purchase with his MasterCard.) At the merchant at Paddy's, the proprietor was holding the terminal and I had to prompt him to press cancel. (From my observations, the proprietor seemed to be somewhat DCC aware and inclined to opt in the unsuspecting.) The Marriott at Circular Quay had replaced its terminals, but the reception offered full disclosure and ability to select the billed currency.

I believe use of contactless payments generally will remove the chance of DCC occurring. Does anyone know if the Pays do not support DCC at all?

http://forum.hongkongcard.com/forumSE/show/15295?page=4 #36

"Alsa still looks the same, but German PayPal states the HKD amount and no obvious way to change. I don't know whether clicking the amount works like Alsa clicking the exchange rate, but after I disabled DCC for my card permanently using the rate in post #1, I was charged in Euros."

That is ridiculous that there is DCC at Marriott Sydney Harbour when you already pay an extra 2% just for using a credit card as payment. I strongly suggest going across the street to the ANZ bank and taking out the cash to make the payment (like I did). ANZ only charges 2 AUD as an ATM fee, and my bank reimburses that anyway. Even with having the MR Visa, I still was against paying the fee.

This is the merchant company that asked for AUD/USD choice for at least one of my transactions: https://www.tyro.com/

The terminal with the vertical chip insert is the Yomani box on this same page.
DCC is an option via Tyro as noted here: https://www.tyro.com/dynamic-currency-conversion-dcc/

They are not hiding the revenue enhancement fact with DCC.

Rasheed

You're right on it not being worth it for the rewards even with a Marriott Visa (which I used for the two transactions). Even though in my case I opted out of DCC, they still hit me for 2% of the total amount for both transactions, A$72.02 in total. :td:

I am very familiar with that ANZ branch, and it's usually my first stop after checking into the hotel after walking from Circular Quay station. I don't know which other hotels levy a credit card surcharge, but it seems like it's becoming more of a problem in Australia.

Imagine a worse case where a naive traveler was using a 3% FTF card, was ignorant of DCC (3.8% in this case), and paid the 2% surcharge... 8.8% stupid tax for using a credit card for the hotel bill.

I'm trying to think of a practical way to pay the hotel room next time. I'm about 50/50 in terms of my stays there on points versus paid, but I think in the future I'll exclusively stay on points or do as you did and pay down the room in cash. Even with the SPG AmEx at 6x, it's unlikely to be worth it.

For me the math is worse (yes Majuki you don't need to point I have Aus savings and credit card accounts; I'm hypothesising the situation where the AUD is low and I do not wish to utilise those savings).

My wife can draw cash with Unionpay, which is 0.42% over the Visa rate
Add the $2 per $1,000 for 0.62% net cost

Alternatively I can card my HKD cards
Unionpay: 0.42% + 2% surcharge - ~1.3% in miles = 1.12% net cost
Visa: 1.85% FTF + 2% surcharge - ~2.07% in miles = 1.78% net cost

(I'm roughly earning 1.3 miles per $ on Unionpay foreign spending, 2.07 per $ on Visa foreign spending, and I'm using 1cpm for valuation)

I was asked but some years ago in a hotel with a similar terminal/PIN pad combination DCC was applied hidden behind the reception desk. Suddenly the lady did not speak English or German anymore.

If anyone's still curious about China, here's one more case I bumped into at a Mexican restaurant in Shanghai some time back:

Terminal doesn't obviously indicate a bank on the main screen, just the words "外卡支付". No apparent way to opt out in the beginning, and it does the checkbox thing (it also shows at the bottom that the bank doing the DCC-ing is called "Nanyue Bank" and indicates a mark-up of 3.8%). The cashier has to reconcile it afterwards, but the way to do so isn't immediately obvious; it's a separate process. You have to press 1 to get into the menu, find "DCC退出", then it asks for the trace number on the card slip. Then it runs the transaction again with only local currency displayed, and the slip shows the transaction type as "DCC VOID".

Bought some stuff on eBay in GBP with a USD credit card. Used the "credit card" option implemented by Paypal which doesn't disclose DCC but does it anyway. Wrote a message to Paypal asking them to represent in GBP, credit the difference (about $1), or threatening to chargeback. They credited the difference to my account.

Now know to use the "Paypal" option (depsite both being implemented by Paypal) and log into my account which does have the option to evade DCC.

After going trough a BBB complaint, they refunded me the full 2.5% conversion upcharge. :D

But, honestly, I just think Paypal is testing how far they can go without worrying about the DCC credit card rules ... This is because DCC chargebacks are pretty rare in comparison to the other types of chargebacks...

If we lose the DCC battle against Paypal, I'm pretty sure all the other smaller banks will follow suit. :mad::mad::mad::mad:

Dubai
 

Shops asked which currency to use but the option to punch is not uniform. Have seen at one shop option 1 represents AED, option 2 represents home currency and then the exact opposite sequence is found at the next shop.

Then at an Iraqui restaurant in the Al Rigga neighborhood, far from the tourist area but in the heart of the "local foreigners" area, I forgot to tell a waiter to use AED when he asked if I could pay cash. Nope, didn't have enough AED with me only had cards. I was distracted and forgot to emphasize to use AED. He came back with a "customer copy" that showed AED or USD but it did not even require a signature and was a done deal in USD.

The bill was below $50 - $47.xx to be exact - billed as $49.49. So the DCC is at 5%. I saw the pending was $47.xx in the correct translation but the actual posting was $49.49. Kind of strange because I have never seen a nonDCC pending then a DCCed posting.

Since the absolute amount is just $2.50 I am not going to dispute it even though I was never given an option.

At the Dubai Mall the US burger chain Five Guys just ran the card in AED without any option to choose.

In Hong Kong now. Had dim sum at Jade Garden at Star House by the Star Ferry. Again the waitress told me "HKD ONLY. We don't take Union Pay!"
Had a new pair of glasses made. The payment went straight to HKD.

So I gather that the DCC in Hong Kong largely confine at hotels and restaurants appeal to expats.

If it happened to me I would still dispute the charge. Usually the issuer will give a credit immediately, but some might perform the full chargeback. By allowing the DCC charge to stand it gives an incentive to continue the behavior. It's a matter of principle for me, not a dispute over being overcharged.

For the pending amounts, it depends how the charge is sent. I have seen some places in HK hold the non-DCC amount, but I don't know if that amount would have been different if I had accepted DCC.

Even if the issuer credits it, eventually they'll put pressure on the networks. Disputing every single forced DCC is important.

+1

Is there a way to opt out of DCC on AirBNB?

No, they don't technically do DCC because they charge you from a merchant account in your local currency using a rate displayed to you in your local currency.

OK will dispute it for the team when we get home.

It is a Chase card. Anybody has experience in the online dispute process on being DCCed? If it can be done online effectively it would be great.

Yes, it can be handled online. Actually, Chase used to (or still might) have something about "if this is about the billed currency, choose this option". I think that would show up if you had selected that you were overcharged/charged an incorrect amount. I would say, "I am requesting a Reason Code 76 chargeback to be billed for the transaction in local currency. The merchant refused to honor my currency selection at the time of purchase, and I was not offered a choice."