‘Cash is king, please use cash here’ is a sign I’ve spotted at several shops and markets in the UK, as a small but vocal resistance to a cashless society continues to fight for notes and coins to keep on existing.
But on our first family holiday abroad, it was a very different experience.
In fact, our holiday to Cyprus this September, the first with our one-year-old son, was a first for another reason: it’s the first time we didn’t use a single note or coin on the entire holiday. And to be honest, it was a lot better this way.
Gone are the days where we’d have to hunt down the Bureau de Change in M&S or Sainsbury’s and try to guess how much we’ll need. Should we buy 500 Euros? 1,000? Is this a good exchange rate? Will they buy them back? Who on earth is going to let us break a 500 Euro note?
All of that is history.
In Cyprus – and this has been my experience in other major European countries of late – you don’t need any cash.
From the moment we arrived in Paphos, the Greek Cyprus holiday hotspot, we used two debit cards – a Santander Edge current account and a Chase Bank current account – to control all our spending.
Both of these cards offer fee-free exchange rate on foreign spending in the EU, which means, unlike with changing cash, you don’t lose any money on the conversion. It’s virtually 1:1.
It meant that we didn’t have to create a holiday budget, or waste a pile of cash on the last day to get rid of it, we just used our debit cards as normal, just as if we were in the UK.
We didn’t do this as some sort of anti-cash protest. We were fully prepared to head to a local cash machine and grab some (fee-free) Euros. But we simply never needed to.
Every taxi in Cyprus accepts card payments. Every restaurant, every shop, and even the market traders in Paphos Old Town Markets – unlike, say, Leeds Kirkgate Market – all take card payments by default, even for a few Euros.
The only thing to watch out for is the local currency conversion. Remembering a key Martin Lewis tip, you need to pay in Euros, not pounds, even if you’re given the choice to pay in GBP. That’s because if you pay in Euros, your bank does the conversion (and Chase and Santander are fee-free conversion with no commission), so it’s cheaper to pay in Euros than it is to pay in pounds with your British bank card abroad.
Ultimately it was a lot easier to just use a bank card everywhere we went; it was easier to budget, we never got caught short without enough money to buy something and we didn’t have to go back to the bank with leftover currency – or waste it on overpriced Toblerones in the duty free – at the end of the trip.
This story originally appeared on Express.co.uk
