Currency Converter

Read this before you use the figure

The rates behind this converter are static reference rates, not live market rates, and the tool says so above. Use it to get a feel for orders of magnitude (roughly what a 400 hotel bill means in your own currency, whether a menu price is cheap or not) and check a live source before you exchange money, accept a quoted price, or commit to anything that matters.

That caveat is less limiting than it sounds. For the questions travellers actually ask while planning, an approximate rate is enough: you are trying to decide whether a destination is affordable, not to arbitrage. It is at the point of payment that precision starts to matter, and at that point the rate you get has more to do with how you pay than with the day’s market number anyway.

The rate you see is never the rate you get

Published exchange rates are interbank rates, what large institutions pay each other. Nobody travelling gets that number. What you actually pay is the interbank rate plus a margin, and the size of the margin varies enormously with the method:

• Card payments are usually converted at close to the network’s own rate, with your bank’s foreign transaction fee added on top. Knowing whether your card charges that fee is worth more than any rate comparison.
• ATM withdrawals carry a fixed fee plus, often, a percentage. Fewer, larger withdrawals therefore cost less than many small ones, the opposite of the instinct to withdraw little and often.
• Airport exchange counters are consistently the worst rate you will be offered anywhere in a country. Changing a small amount for immediate transport is reasonable; changing your trip budget there is not.

Dynamic currency conversion: always decline

When a card terminal or cash machine abroad offers to charge you in your home currency instead of the local one, that is dynamic currency conversion. It looks like a convenience, you see a familiar number, and it is reliably more expensive, because the merchant’s payment processor sets the rate and keeps the margin.

The rule is simple and has no realistic exception: always choose to be billed in the local currency. Your own bank will then do the conversion at its own rate. This single habit usually saves more than any amount of rate-shopping.

Practical habits while travelling

Learn one anchor price. Rather than converting every transaction, memorise what one familiar item costs (a coffee, a metro ride, a mid-range dinner) in local money. After a day you will be judging prices against the local scale instead of doing arithmetic, which is both faster and a better guide to whether something is a fair price locally.

Carry a second card on a different network, stored separately. Cards get blocked, swallowed and declined abroad for reasons that have nothing to do with your balance. This is the single most useful piece of money preparation for a trip.

Keep a small cash reserve. Even in heavily card-based countries, small vendors, rural transport and tips often remain cash-only.

Check which currency actually circulates. Some destinations quote prices in a major currency but give change in the local one, and some have restrictions on taking currency in or out. Our country guides note the local currency for each destination.

For budgeting rather than spending

If you are converting to work out what a trip will cost, build the budget in the local currency first and convert once at the end. Converting each input as you go compounds rounding errors and makes it harder to sanity-check individual figures against local prices. The Trip Budget Calculator is currency-agnostic for that reason: feed it local figures, convert the total.

Related tools

See Plan Your Trip for where money preparation fits in the wider planning sequence, and the Days Until Trip countdown for when to tell your bank you are travelling.