Nowadays, people may go abroad, visit foreign countries more often than before, either on business travel or personal, family vacation. Paying for staying in hotels, renting a car, buying train and airline tickets, paying for meals, paying for services, etc, a lot of places you need spend money to pay. Carrying big cash along is sure not a good choice. People more prefer using credit card for most of those.
When people come back home and get the credit card statement, you will find out other than the actual amount of money spent on those services or merchandises, there is one called foreign transaction fee coming along each payment occurrence too. So before you decide which credit card you will use for purchase when you are visiting foreign countries, you’d better find out what the fee and how much your credit card issuers will charge you.

I went to Canada recently and used American Express for every purchase. And I found out American Express will charge 2.7% of every transaction as Foreign Transaction Fee. For example, other than I spent $505.50 for staying at hotel, I paid another $13.65 as Foreign Transaction Fee.

For the cards from Visa and MasterCard, since the cards are issued by banks such as CitiBank, Chase, Bank of America or Capital One, so for each purchase occurs in foreign countries, Visa and MasterCard will charge 1% of the amount for purchase as Foreign Transaction Fee, most banks will add additional 1 to 2 % too. This adds up you could be charged 2 to 3 % Foreign Transaction Fee for each purchase.

Recently I found out that if I use the Visa debt card from credit union account, I only need pay 1% to Visa as Foreign Transaction Fee and I don’t need to pay any penny of Foreign Transaction Fee to credit union at all. So next time I may use my Visa debt card as alternate when I visit foreign countries.