European travel from Australia: currency conversion and travel cards

There are many other resources on these topics and feel free to browse around for a wider range of opinions but what I did was to use S Money to do my currency conversion (I used Travelex for the New Zealand but S Money is offering me a much better conversion rate, S Money is not able to offer me a single trip conversion like Travelex and hence takes a higher service charge compared to Travelex for the same amount of foreign currency needed but the better exchange rate covers it and for a rough idea we are talking about 0.6 compared 0.58x on any given day between S Money and Travelex. The other consideration is that Travelex has way more branches and so you can easily get to a place close by whereas at the end of last year when I started with S Money they only had the single branch on Spencer Street in the city in Melbourne but now it has about 4 locations in Melbourne now and I think they have similar expansions interstate too). 

For a travel card, I elected to go with the Suncorp Everyday account because that’s the only non credit card that offers Internet banking for me. I could have elected to go with a credit card and I tried applying for the Latitude Platinum Mastercard because it offered free wifi as a perk but I gave up because once I saved my application and tried to resume I just couldn’t get back in. When I rang customer service, I was told that basically there was only one number for all applicants to connect to and that you just had to try logging onto the system every 15-20 minutes. I tried that about 5 or 6 times and being impatient in nature, I just gave up on it. That and Mum continuously worrying me about applying for a credit card and the interest rate charges involved. In practice, I’ve found out that while the Suncorp does not charge the visa 3% fee for transacting with overseas companies, if the other side charges it (eg. Swiss railway company), then you still incur the 3% but ah well, it still beats the bank card of our Big 4 bank that automatically slaps on the 3% charge on.