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really confused about exchange rate


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I am staying at the Marriott Delta Suites in Downtown Vancouver in just a few short weeks. I got a great us govt employee rate of 469 Canadian Dollars for two nights. I am assuming that this is about 362 in Us Dollars. I would like to pay cash for my room, but was told by a friend who just checked today at the bank that it would cost me well over 500 us dollars to get that much in canadian dollars. This does not make any sense to me. Am I just better off putting my room on my Visa??

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I don't know what your bank's CAD buy rate for exchange from USD, but Royal Bank here in Canada is showing a buy rate of 1.2555. The currency calculator shows $469 CAD = $373.56 USD. Please note that your VISA might use a better rate than a bank buy rate. Hope this helps.

 

Cheers! Roehl

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Your friend must have gotten the Buy and Sell rates confused, mixed up which currency they were looking at, or your bank is basically pure evil when it comes to currency! For a long time now the rate has been bouncing around between 74 and 80cents US to 1CAD - so you can use a nice easily-workable 4CAD = 3USD (or '75 US cents buys me one whole Canadian dollar') when you're doing a quick 'how much is lunch costing me?' calc in your head with a modest error margin. As long as you remember that since USD are worth more than CAD, you should always have a smaller number than you start with when converting to USD. In other words, your friend is an idiot;-)

 

The rule of thumb 4:3 ratio says that CAD$469 is roughly (divide by 4, multiply by 3) US$352. Checking the current Interbank rate on several online currency exchange sites I have bookmarked gives actual rates of about US$362.80. $10 out, so if you were buying cheap souvenirs or lunch more like a couple of bucks error max - but if you plan to buy a Rolex, do the math properly on your cellphone calculator!

 

Credit cards all do basically the same thing - charge roughly the actual 'interbank' exchange rate, which is better than you can ever possibly get cash for. Many however add a Foreign Transaction Fee - which legally has to be specified in your agreement, so you can check your paperwork and see what % they apply. Every card we have ever had, whether Canadian, US, or UK-issues, also indicate the specific exchange rate data referred to and the time that it is checked (e.g. 'all transaction on Date X will be processed at the the prevailing rate of Index Y at noon in Time Zone Y') and when we've checked against the published rate, that has been the case (many people suspect that 'no FTF' cards use a worse rate to somehow screw you another way - they don't).

 

Unless you want to spend more money, you should just put it on your card even if it has a typical 2.5% FTF charge - this will still be cheaper than swapping funds at your bank. Only if you take it out of a Canadian ATM using a debit card with no fees will you get a better cash rate, so why bother? Use cash when you have to for small purchases at Mom & Pop stores, or the occasional Cash Only food truck or cheap resto - use your card everywhere you can. VISA is extremely common up here, almost universally accepted (transit tickets, if you still have a card without a Chip, are the only likely problem for acceptance).

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  • 4 months later...

Hi Marcia, if you have Canadian dollars left that will cover the fare plus tip, I would recommend using that so as to not have to get taken by the exchange rate differential twice (buy rate first and then sell rate second).  If you use credit card, choose the pay in $CAD (if pay in $USD is offerred) so as to get the bank/credit card exchange rate and no merchant fee (charged for the convenience of paying in your home currency, which I have read is at least 3%).  Do not use $USD on a par basis because there is over 33% exchange. Cheers!  Roehl

 

PS:  Just read my narrative and realize there are a lot of words, when the following might suffice "Use $CAD."

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The only amendment I'll make to CS63's post is that since you mentioned airport TO the pier, rather than the other way around, odds are that you are just arriving in Canada (i.e. unless you got CAD cash before leaving home, or on a prior trip which you kept, you won't have any on you).

 

Credit card (Visa/MC anyway, some cab companies don't take Amex and Discover is extremely rarely accepted up here) is the way to go, but do agree that if the machine gives you the choice of currency pay in CAD, not USD - I have yet to find any 'middleman' currency exchange service that does not charge at least 4% for your convenience whereas US credit cards offer no FTF charge at all and even a run-of-the-mill card only charges 2.5% FTF.

 

Cabbies will generally be more than happy to take USD cash, and while I'm sure some will try to seriously abuse the exchange rate by taking it at par most offer a fairer-but-still-much-worse-than-any-credit-card unofficial exchange rate involving rounding in their favour by 5-10%.

 

The good thing about taking the trip in this direction is that cabs are fixed rate - no need to worry about getting the runaround with the meter on when you just arrived and don't know the city! To the pier is CAD$35, incl tax, so CAD$40 is enough to include a perfectly decent tip (ballpark US$30).

6 hours ago, geomarc said:

What type of payment do you suggest we use for a taxi from YVR to the pier?

 

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