TravelTalkOnline Forums Travel and Vacation Forums St. Maarten - St. Martin Foriegn transaction fees

Just received an email from my AA Citi Bank.

"Great news, no foreign transaction fees is coming!
You won't be charged any foreign transaction fees on purchases after November 15, 2015. You can use your card abroad on all your travels without having to worry about being charged this fee."

Thought it was about time for this.

Wow, that is good news! Our business card is an AA Citibank card, and that's the one we generally use on SXM.. <img src="http://www.traveltalkonline.com/forums/images/graemlins/Clapping.gif" alt="" />

A day late and a dollar short.

I Think the AA Venture Card ( the old USAIR card) is also dropping the foreign transaction fee.

Which AA Citibank card? There appear to be many. Mine just sent new T's and C's, still with a 3% foreign transaction fee. Mine is a Citibank Aadvantage World Elite Gold.

Discover Card has not had one for a long time and Capital One does not have the fee either.

I will go back to my Citibank card so I can get airline points.

If that works for you then that is a good choice. Personally, I will take my Discover and Capital One and the cash back and spend it how I choose. Airline points are basically useless to me unless it is Delta.

We also took out a Capital one card And that is good no doubt. However we like the miles but do not ask why. No idea.

Not in effect till November 15 as I posted.

Why anyone would prefer airline miles over points is beyond me. I have a Capital One card that gives me 2 points for every dollar. I used to have the AAdvantage card but it was not a good deal. Here's why..
AA card.. You can only use it on AA. They charge you to redeem the miles. Blackout dates? We tried months in advance to take a trip using AA miles and they had no seats for us no matter what date and no matter how far in advance we asked for. They charge you to combine miles into one account. No new miles for miles flown on the free trip.

Capital One... You can use them on any airline. Since you are actually buying the tickets, there are no blackout dates. Any date is good. They don't charge you to redeem your points. Since you're buying the tickets with your CC, you get points for that as well. Since you are buying the tickets, you get airline miles for the airline you're flying. You can combine all of your miles into one account at no charge.

++1, we love the convenience of Capital One.
Every time we tried to use AA mileage, they would have too many layovers to cities not even on our way.

It really depends on where you are. As of now anyway, pre the full merger with US Air, we have had very little problem getting AA flights to SXM with miles, for 35K...

"They charge you to redeem the miles."
No they don't. The charges are for the airport fees that you would pay anyway.
I never have problems booking my miles flights. Have flown on AA miles many times to SXM for the minimum miles on weekends. Just have to book when the flights first come out. Works for us as we know with our fixed timeshare weeks when we need the flights and book 331 days prior.
To each their own but it works for us from the Pacific North West where R/T economy is close to a thousand pp. We are flying there again on miles with only one stop. I can't complain about that.

Similar to owning a timeshare. The concept works for some people and not for others.

i primarily use a CapOne Venture card, but i can also say we've never had much trouble using points to get award seats many times on AA, both to the Caribbean and Europe...BF/FC at the lowest point requirement <img src="http://www.traveltalkonline.com/forums/images/graemlins/Thumbsup.gif" alt="" />

Bank of America Travel Visa also does not charge exchange fees and does accumulate points. They offer a good deal on travel charges but the CATCH seems to be that the travel related stuff has to be booked thru the BOA Travel site, kind of sneaky. Still working on trying to figure out how the points and redemption $'s really work. They always tell you how great the deal is for you but somewhere in the mix there has to be a deal for them. From the little exploration I have done to date their travel site seems to be hooked up with Expedia.

A few months ago, I too finally got fed up with paying a 3% foreign transation fee on our primary card. After extensive research, including a very informative thread here on TTOL, I settled on CapitalOne's Venture card with the 2% cash back feature (note: they also offer a 1.5% rewards card, with slightly different cost and benefit structure). Bottom line: I am a happy customer so far, after receiving a substantial signing bonus and running my first island charge through (a hotel reservation) with no problems and prompt credit to my points account.
Week 5051 provided an excellent summary of the CapOne card. I would only add that you have a couple options for using your points: 1) call them, and ask for a monetary credit against any travel related charges on your statement, or 2) receive periodic rebate checks directly from CapOne.

CapOne also has a setting which will e-mail every international transaction, so if the card ever does get compromised, you will know it immediately.

The easiest way to use the Capitol One Venture Card credits is to sign into your account online, select redeem, choose the transactions you wish to "erase", and click. Travel purchases are erased at two dollars per point, and even our timeshare maintenance fees, which we charge in six equal installments to our CapOne card, qualify as travel purchases.

while doing it online is the easiest way to redeem, if you have charges that do not show up as "travel" on CapOne's website, you can call them and they are pretty accomodating when requesting to claim travel credit against most restaurant, gasoline, tolls, etc. charges

Interesting! I've never needed to do that as I always have enough travel expenses to use my credits. But it's good to know that they'll allow other charges that might not appear to be travel-related.

Same here. If tolls, restaurants and gasoline expenses are part of travel, then there should be other traditional travel expenses as well. But it's good to know that you can have the bank change the categories of some expenses.

With regard to American Airline we have had problems the past 4 years using our mile , two years ago it cost us 70,000 miles each to travel to SXM not in high season ,but in late October that was the last time we used AA . We had only used AA for all our flights to were ever we flew , dought we will ever use them again . Now we have Captial One Adventure card we pick the flight and away we go no hassle .

High or low doesn't really make a big difference in amount of miles with AA. It's how early you book to get the low mile flights.

Not true. It does depend on the season or the exact day. During busy days you must use Anytime miles which are double the Miles Saver miles.

We fly on weekends and have always been able to get our flights with milesaver miles. Course, knowing our dates way in advance with our fixed week timeshare we book 331 days out. We fly in and out on Saturdays. Already have them for next years trip.

I agree with 'weeks'. I've tried to use miles on AA for the lower mileage requirement, on the first day the flights became available without success. We only travel on Saturdays, usually leaving the first or second one in February and returning in March.

It depends on where you're flying from, etc. We were able to get tickets to fly down at Christmas last year, flew down on a Friday, came home on a Tuesday, I think, but it was definitely high season. But, as I said before, getting flights from Miami is not nearly as hard as from some other places..

Lets hope SXM takes AMEX No fees thee either

You should carry another card in case, as many places do not accept AMEX.

Haven't found too many places on the Island that takes Amex. There are some threads from back in time that cover the issue pretty well. I use a Chase card tied to Marriott that has no transaction fees. We stay French and I just charge in Euros and the bank converts on the prevailing rate. Pretty easy.