Briefings/19
Practical · Continent-wide
Cards, cash, and the conversion trick
How to pay without donating a percentage to a cash machine that offered to be helpful.
6 minute read · Desk edition, October 2026
The button you refuse
A cash machine in Prague, Budapest, or a resort street will often ask if you would like to be charged in your home currency. The rate is a small theft dressed as a convenience. Decline it. Let your own bank do the conversion. Pay in the currency of the country on card terminals too, when they ask the same question.
The euro is not the currency of Europe. Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Denmark, Sweden and Romania will take a card and still expect their own notes for small things. Switzerland and Norway are not in the Union and are not shy about prices. Britain is a different index. Bulgaria joined the euro on 1 January 2026; if your memory of Sofia is in lev, update it before you argue with a waiter.
What to carry
A card that works abroad, and a second one kept somewhere else, will solve almost every city day. A modest amount of local cash still matters for a bakery that has a sign, a market stall, a church box, and the occasional taxi that prefers notes. Get the cash from a machine attached to a bank, in daylight, not from a glass booth advertising a rate in the brightest colour on the street.
Tipping is not an American percentage. Rounding up, or a few euros for unhurried service, is the ordinary gesture. A machine that demands eighteen percent before it will give you the receipt is that restaurant’s policy. You may pay it. You should not believe it is the law of the land.
See also
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