[ TIPS · THE DISPATCH ]

Cash or Card Abroad? The Real Answer Depends on Where You're Going

I've been stranded at a card-only kiosk with a pocket of useless coins, and stuck at a cash-only noodle stall holding a contactless card like an idiot. The cash-or-card question has no single answer — it has a country.

The honest answer to “cash or card when traveling abroad” is the most annoying answer there is: it depends where you’re going. I know. You wanted a rule. There isn’t one. What there is, after years of getting this wrong in both directions, is a way to think about it that’s saved me from standing red-faced at a counter while a queue builds behind me.

Two memories shaped everything I do now. One: a transit machine in Stockholm that took only cards, while I stood there with a fistful of kronor I’d just queued to withdraw, feeling like I’d time-travelled from 1998. Two: a noodle stall in Hanoi, the good one, the one down the alley, where I waved my shiny contactless card at a woman who looked at me like I’d offered to pay in seashells. Cash only. Obviously cash only. The best food is always cash only.

Some places have basically left cash behind, and turning up with a wallet full of notes there marks you instantly as someone who didn’t do the reading.

The Nordics are the obvious ones. In Sweden I went eleven days once and used cash exactly zero times — some shops have signs saying they won’t take it. Norway, Denmark, Finland are similar. Big chunks of the Netherlands too, where you’ll hit shops that are card-only and, oddly, some that want a local debit system that your foreign card won’t even work with (carry a card and a backup card there).

In these places, tap-to-pay is the air you breathe. A tiny bakery, a bus, a public toilet, a busker with a card reader — all card. Pulling out cash is slower and occasionally just refused. Here, your phone or a contactless card is genuinely all you need, and lugging around withdrawn cash is a small self-inflicted tax.

Now flip it. In a lot of the world — and crucially, at the specific places you actually want to eat and shop — cash is still king, and a card gets you nowhere.

Much of Southeast Asia. Big parts of Japan, still, somehow — temples, small ryokan, that perfect tiny izakaya with six seats, all cash, in 2026, in the most futuristic country on earth. Local markets everywhere. Street food, basically universally. The €4 lunch that’s better than the €40 one almost always wants coins.

There’s a pattern here worth internalising: the more touristy and formal a place, the more it takes cards. The more local and brilliant, the more it wants cash. So if you go card-only in these countries, you don’t just risk being stuck — you self-select into the worse, pricier, more tourist-facing version of everywhere. The card cuts you off from the good half of the country.

So in cash-leaning places I carry a working daily float of local notes, kept somewhere not-my-main-wallet, and I treat the card as the backup, not the default. Exactly the reverse of the Nordics.

Whatever country you’re in, there’s one trick at the terminal that quietly robs travellers every single day, and it’s the same everywhere. The machine, or the ATM, asks: do you want to pay in your home currency or the local one? It’ll even helpfully show the price in pounds or dollars, like it’s doing you a favour.

Always, always choose the local currency. Always.

Choosing your home currency triggers “dynamic currency conversion,” where the merchant’s terminal does the exchange at a rate they invented, which is reliably terrible — I’ve seen 6 to 8% worse than the real rate, baked in silently. Letting your own bank or card do the conversion (which it does automatically when you pay in local currency) gets you the proper market rate. The terminal asking is not a courtesy. It’s a trap dressed as one, and it preys on the comfort of seeing a familiar currency symbol.

This applies at ATMs too. “Withdraw 200 EUR — would you like to be charged 174.50 GBP?” No. Decline the conversion. Take the euros. Let your bank sort the rate.

Last thing, learned the hard way. Even in the most card-obsessed country, carry a little emergency cash. Machines go down. A power cut takes the card readers with it. Your card gets flagged by your bank for “unusual activity” (i.e. being abroad, which you told them about, but here we are) and freezes at the worst moment. A small fold of local notes tucked away is the difference between a shrug and a genuine problem in a town where you don’t speak the language.

I keep maybe €50-equivalent untouched, separate from spending cash, the whole trip. Most trips I never break it. The one trip you need it, you’ll feel like a genius.

So no, there’s no universal answer. There’s just: read the country before you go, default to whatever it defaults to, always pay local at the terminal, and keep a quiet cash float for when the future stops working.

Match the country, refuse the conversion, and carry just enough cash to survive a dead card reader — do that and you’ll never be the flustered one at the counter again.

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