Firstly I am sorry if this has been discussed elsewhere. I had a fairly extensive look but most topics seem to be country specific.
I was traveling across south east Asia for 4 months last year and found using my HSBC bank card fairly easy but the transaction fees ended up being over £200 for the durartion of my trip!
A few friends have Monzo accounts for sole use in the UK and speak very highly of them. However I will be traveling across Brazil, Peru, Costa Rica, Colombia, Nicaragua, Philippines and Australia over the next 18 months and would like something a bit easier to use and not so many fees to have to factor in.
So my main question is would people recommend this as a good “traveling” card so to speak? The main issue I have is the constant changing of currencies between the South American countries which has put me off taking x amount of cash in that countries currency only to not use it, or worse still, need more and have to pay the high HSBC fees!
Any help would be greatly appreciated, even if there are other threads on the forum I have missed.
Monzo is a great holiday card, but I’ve got to be honest and say for a trip such as yours spanning multiple countries over a long period, I’d be looking at Starling first due to the higher withdrawal rates, should it be needed.
Maybe a combination of the two to give you extra headroom!
I’d actually reccomend a combination of Starling and Revolut. Starling because they don’t have limits on withdrawals like Monzo do, and Revolut because they issue Visa cards and not Mastercard which you tend to have better luck with for acceptance in places where a Monzo card may decline.
I travel extensively on a regular basis and I always take my Monzo which I try to use wherever I can but also have a standard credit card as a back up and to be on a safe side.
In most countries I can use Monzo and I only came across the card being rejected in Japan as far as I remember which was due to Monzo tech issues and once when I didn’t confirm / sync my app And my card got frozen. Monzo support team was great though and helped every time very swiftly.
