What are your biggest budget travelling annoyances/problems?

Ah missfrugal, live and learn. Some of us here on the TT have been advocating for years that people only buy a one way ticket to A and then wing it from there. Rarely does a relatively new traveller take heed. We humans seem to always need to learn from our OWN mistakes and are not able to learn from others.

TCs are going the way of the Dodo and no experienced traveller here on the TT would suggest buying them.

Visa charges are a whole subject that most people know very little about. They see a bank advertising, 'no foreign transaction fees' and THINK it refers to exchange rates. It does not.

In that regard missfrugal, what is your home country, I may be able to tell you the best cards to use. There are good answers for the US, UK and Australia. You may not have to put up with poor exchange.

Hi travelinstyle

I'm from the UK and intend on taking with me the Halifax clarity credit card (and paying money into this before I need to withdraw money so that I never have to pay interest charges) and the Nationwide debit card since it offers free with/the cheapest withdrawal charges from the UK banks as far as I can see. Have you got any other recommendations which are better than these?

thanks for your help in advance

Indian and Thai Tuk Tuks that are determined to take you to their "sponsor"...for shopping...no matter what you say... This gets to be a real problem...after a while...

Its hard not to go along under high pressure sales...

And its hard to just say NO...so develop your script ahead of time.... Don't accept any free chai or sodas... Worse the prices are not exactly cheap...! Then you are stuck with something to carry for the rest of your trip...

A really cheap train ticket that has you sitting straight up on a hard seat all night is not doing you any good...and can make you miserable the next day...

Always take the cheap bed dorm...and hope it doesn't fill up...or if it does...don't worry about it...go with it...its only for a night or two... If you can afford a smaller dorm...go for it...

Use the Internet to book your rooms a little ahead...its very easy...and very accurate ...But don't box yourself in by planning too far ahead...unless you have a really good reason...like booking the last few days of the trip

Take lots of photos...and forget the coffee cups and the "I (heart)___ tee shirts"... But also don't buy nothing....a small momento might be interesting to you later...no matter how great your photos are...

Those are good cards missfrugal. For residents of the UK there is a good website which is kept up to date.
http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/travel/cheap-travel-money Such a website does not exist for all countries unfortunately so consider yourself lucky.

Your Halifax credit card is number 1 but Norwich & Peterborough is a better debit card than the Nationwide. Nationwide now charges a withdrawal fee while N&P does not. Both add no exchange loading. Nationwide does not add a fee if you want foreign currency from inside the UK but does when you are outside the UK. http://www.nationwide.co.uk/current_account/managing_your_account/using-your-cards-abroad.htm

I would not pre-load the Halifax card. They may object to you doing that as strictly speaking it is against the cardholder agreement. If you do it several times they may freeze the card. If that happens while you are on the road it would obviously be a problem.

Instead I would simply go to your online banking each month. Check the charges on your card and transfer funds from your savings account to pay the balance in full on the due date.

Never use the credit card to withdraw cash, that is what debit card is for. So if you pay your credit card balance in full each month and use your debit for cash withdrawals, there will be no fees and no interest charged.

@Travelinstyle46, I hate to barge in on this post but I would be extremely grateful if you could be so kind as to share the link or secrets for cards in the US. Thanks for all the previous posts from everyone; great topic! Thanks

http://www.cardhub.com/credit-cards/foreign-transaction-fee/

That site appears to be ok TexasMade. The only way to check is to make a transaction using a card and then compare what exchange rate you got to the rate on http://www.oanda.com/currency/converter/ for that specific day. The Oanda exchange calculator lets you pick a specific day and add on a percentage to the Interbank Rate.

If the card you use is not adding a percentage you should see the same rate at Interbank +1%. The 1% is what Visa/MC charges the bank to use their system. I know of no bank that eats the 1% Visa/MC charge. Although Nationwide in the UK used to do so.

So Interbank +1% is as close as you will get to a perfect Interbank exchange rate.

Accommodation is major expenditure in budget travelling

DaveShield,
If you don't have 'annoyances/problems', you're not travelling.
If had to pick something, would be outdated information re- prices, and outdated maps. Difficult to get around these issues.

LOL, all that means kilbar is that you haven't travelled enough to reach the point where you accept things as part of travel. Letting little things like outdated information re prices annoy you makes no sense to me. If you are referring to guidebook prices and maps, I expect them to be out of date. There's no difficulty getting around these issues if you don't rely on them.

Hey travelinstyle, I'm from the U.S. getting ready to jet off on an around-the-world, so I'd love to hear how not to get screwed on exchange rates. :-) Cheers!