Foreign Perspectives

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This used to be relatively simple in that it was always the Nationwide for foreign holidays, almost always MBNA for a big limit and generally CapitalOne for a stable low-ish rate.

However, all that’s changed. Although, for the most part the changes are for the better, it means that when you compare credit cards on the various comparison sites there’s a lot more in the way of questions that they need to ask you upfront. For example, these days the Nationwide isn’t the best card to go for if you’re looking for a card to use overseas as the Post Office credit card doesn’t load on as much in the way of cash advance fees as the Nationwide do these days thus when you compare credit cards for use abroad the Nationwide has lost the top spot which it has held for around ten years.

Other things to consider are those cards that don’t charge to withdraw cash. Obviously, you’d not want to be doing that on a regular basis with interest rates being what they are but it’s handy to have a card that will allow you to do that. Sadly, none so far have both dropped the foreign transaction charge and the withdrawal charge but with the competition heating up in overseas use charges perhaps one of them will break ranks and do just that. After all, not so long ago the Nationwide just charged 50p for a cash withdrawal.

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In big hotels towels and whatnot go “missing” and it’s classed as wastage basically because it would be pretty difficult to identify who’d made off with things as so many different people are involved.

However, in our place which is very much at the smaller end of the scale, there are very few people involved so it’s easy enough to identify the culprits. For example, just this morning a family checked out and made off with four of our towels. Sometimes you wonder why people do that but in this case it’s pretty clear: they had ordered four breakfasts but only ate one. Therefore in lieu of the three breakfasts which we’d charged them for they thought that they’d take two little towels and two big ones.

Net effect? Well, they’ve been charged EUR 40 and received an e-mail letting them know we’ll refund it if we get the towels back next week.

Now, what they’re going to say is that they didn’t do it and obviously it must have been our cleaning person. Well, as it happens I’m the person who both puts the towels into the rooms and takes them out again. I put six in and took two out therefore they took the other four.

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I’m one of those people who try to get appropriate gifts for people and ones that they’d not think of getting for themselves. It doesn’t really seem like a gift to me if it’s something that you’d have bought for yourself anyway.

So something like Tahitian pearls are particularly interesting. Unlike gold or diamonds, pearls are one of those things that don’t really have a commercial value as such or at least not one that’s not jewelry related at any rate. They’re also something that you’d not really expect to be wearing all the time and are that little bit more unusual for that thus fitting the bill of being a relatively unique gift which is itself unusual these days.

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