When Buying Flights Abroad, Always Check the Currency
When you’re abroad, paying in your local currency is often the best option for your wallet, except when it comes to flights.
When booking a trip to Korea from Japan, one passenger paid KRW 100,000, or $ 85 each, for six business seats on his family’s flight – only to discover that the purchase was made in Japanese Yen and actually spent almost $ 900 per ticket.
Needless to say, I couldn’t enjoy the great service or my place, and since I was the only one making all the reservations, I didn’t feel like I could ask anyone in my family to help offset the large expenses. Lesson learned: Know what currency you are using and if you get a call asking for payment confirmation make sure you are asking for the full price.
As he explained, Expedia, the site through which he reserved, also contacted him to verify the payments he had confirmed without questioning the conversions of dollars.
To avoid having an equally large position on your credit card bill, you should always check the currency of your purchase, especially if you are booking a trip abroad; many airline websites will set prices based on your current location.
To change this, you must look for the option to switch the currency or find the US version on the airline’s website. Through United, you can find this option to change country or currency at the top of the airline’s website .
Sometimes buying a flight in another currency is actually cheaper ; You may find that paying in the currency of where this airline is located is the best option, for example writes Thrillist .
You can easily compare deals by changing the currency on the sites and searching for your flight on other sites such as Google Flights or Skyscanner . But be sure to check if your credit card company charges fees for foreign transactions, you might end up paying more for these transactions than you would otherwise save when booking your flight in another currency.