Which is the best debit card or forex card to use in foreign country especially USA while traveling from India?
Forex card is almost a commodity. There’s not much to choose between forex cards issued by two different banks.
(That said, if nonbank fintechs have started issuing forex cards, they might offer some value-added features compared to bank-issued forex cards, and it might be worth checking them out).
Based on my experience, here are a couple of things to keep in mind about *any* forex card:
If you get a forex card on Friday PM and travel to USA / Europe on Friday / Saturday, it’d be Saturday or even Sunday in India by the time you reach your destination. Banks in India tend to upload the forex card transaction to their core systems only on Monday AM. Ergo, even though your card has been loaded with forex, it will show zero balance during the weekend in USA / Europe. This will land you in hot water at your hotel during check-in and at other merchant establishments.
Whichever bank’s forex card you buy, raise this point with them upfront and ask them how they’ll ensure you don’t face this problem.
While the moment of reckoning happens only when you you swipe / dip / tap the forex card into a POS machine in USA / Europe, it still helps to raise this point with your bank in India. It conveys the message that you’re more knowledgeable than their average customer, which will hopefully get them to give your transaction kid gloves treatment so that you won’t have a problem.
While you can get cash from a forex card by visiting an ATM abroad, bear in mind that cash withdrawal limits in American and European ATMs are comparatively low compared to India viz. US$ 200 / GBP 100 / EUR 100 per day. It’s as though they’re perpetually in the state of cash crunch that India went through during the two months following #CurrencySwitch in November 2016!
The limit won’t matter for cab fare, food and so on. But, if you need to make a big ticket payment immediately upon arrival (e.g. deposit for rented house), you’ll typically need four or five figure sums. You’re highly unlikely to find a single ATM in USA / Europe that will dispense that kind of cash in a single day. For my deposit in UK, I’d have had to visit the ATM for 15 days to be able to withdraw the required cash. Since I anticipated this, I avoided Forex Card and took the funds in the form of Travelers Checks.
TCs are easy to encash at airports, railways stations and malls in Europe. But they’re relatively uncommon in USA – a coworker of mine spent $175 on cab fare to find the nearest exchange bureau that exchanged TC for cash in Florida. So, if you need to make a big ticket payment in USA, avoid TC and Forex Card. Instead have the funds wired to your beneficiary in USA.