[ TIPS · THE DISPATCH ]

Tipping in Coins You Can't Use: How to Spend Down Foreign Cash Before You Fly

Knowing what to do with leftover foreign currency before your flight saves you the slow bleed of dead coins in a drawer. The airport snack play, the charity bins, and why you should never let the kiosk convert it back.

I have a drawer. You probably have a drawer too. Mine has roughly eleven currencies in it, none of them enough to buy anything, all of them too sentimental-feeling to throw away, and collectively worth maybe thirty quid that I will never, ever see again. That drawer is the reason I now think hard about what to do with leftover foreign currency before I’m standing at a departure gate with a pocket full of clinking metal I can’t use.

Because here’s the cruel maths of it. Notes you can sometimes exchange. Coins? Almost nobody takes coins back. Not the bank, not the kiosk, not the bureau de change with the smug exchange board. They are, the moment you leave the country, basically souvenirs that hurt to sit on.

So let’s get you out cleaner than I usually manage.

This is the golden rule and I break it every single trip because I forget, and then I’m sad. Coins are the dead weight. They’re the part of your float that has zero resale value the instant you cross a border.

So from about your second-to-last day, start paying in coins. Buy the coffee with exact change scraped together like a kid at a sweet shop. Tip in coins where tipping in coins is normal and not insulting (read the room — in some places leaving a fistful of shrapnel reads as a snub, not a thanks). Top up a metro card you’ll use on the way to the airport. Round everything up to a cash payment.

You want to land at the airport with, ideally, a couple of notes and nothing jingling.

Right, you’ve still got cash. Of course you do. The single best use of it is the thing you were going to buy anyway.

Have your last proper meal in actual local cash rather than tapping a card. Same money, but now it’s clearing your float instead of adding a foreign-transaction fee. Then at the airport — once you’re through security — the snack-and-water run is your friend. Airside shops take local cash, and a bottle of water plus something for the flight will quietly absorb a surprising chunk.

Duty-free is the heavy hitter though. Most duty-free counters will take a mix of cash and card, so you can dump every last note and coin into, say, a bar of chocolate or that bottle you were eyeing, and just put the remainder on the card. Tell the cashier “I want to use all my cash first” — they do this constantly, it’s not weird.

Okay, this is the bit I get properly annoyed about. Those airport currency kiosks that offer to change your leftover cash back into your home currency? Run.

The spread on a buy-back is brutal. They sell you the currency at one rate on the way in and buy it back at a much worse one on the way out, and you eat the difference both directions. You’ll hand over the equivalent of twenty and get back the equivalent of thirteen, and they’ll smile while they do it. And they won’t touch your coins anyway, which were the whole problem.

If you absolutely must convert notes — like, it’s a chunk of money and you’ve genuinely got no use for it — at least do it in the city at a decent bureau, not the airport, and definitely not at the gate. But honestly? Nine times out of ten you’re better off spending it down than selling it back at a loss.

So you’ve done everything right and you still have coins. There’s always a few. The metro top-up didn’t take the small ones, the cafe rounded weird, whatever.

Most major airports have charity collection bins right by the gates or in the arrivals hall — clear perspex boxes for exactly this. UNICEF runs a lot of them; airlines collect onboard too, sometimes handing out little envelopes mid-flight. Those dead coins that no bank on earth will accept become genuinely useful to someone the second you drop them in. It’s the one outcome that feels better than hoarding.

I started doing this a few years back and it’s weirdly satisfying. The coins were going to rot in a drawer regardless. This way they at least go somewhere.

• Don’t overspend to “use it up.” I’ve watched people buy a second airport sandwich they didn’t want just to clear a note. That’s not saving money, that’s the kiosk logic in reverse. If the only thing left to buy is stuff you don’t need, bin the coins, keep the note as a souvenir, move on.
• Watch out for currencies you’ll be back for. If you go to the same country every year, keep a small stash deliberately — a starter float for next time beats withdrawing fresh and paying the ATM fee again. I keep a little envelope of euros and yen for exactly this. Those don’t count as dead money. The drawer is for orphans.
• Big notes can hide. Check every pocket of the bag, the back of the wallet, the coat you only wore once. The number of times I’ve found a perfectly good note after landing home is genuinely upsetting.

The whole trick, really, is just deciding the float is a problem to solve and not a thing to carry home and feel mildly guilty about. Spend the coins early. Eat and snack and duty-free your way through the notes. Skip the buy-back. Bin the dregs for charity.

Do it right and you’ll walk off the plane with an empty money pocket and a slightly heavier bag of chocolate, which is exactly how it should be.

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