Between late June and the first week of September, every machine within walking distance of a European beach has been drained by lunchtime. The queue at the one that still works is the closest thing that resort has to a social club. We priced this problem in March and again in August, on the same stretch of the Algarve, and got two different answers. Two answers, one coast.
“Carry a spare card and you’ll be fine”
Mostly true, but only if the two cards are not twins. A debit card and a credit card issued by the same bank, on the same network, fail together the moment the bank decides your spending looks odd, and a fraud block in Faro at 11pm is not a conversation anyone wants. Our check in August: the debit card refused at three separate ATMs and went through for the first time at a supermarket till, which suggests the block was on cash withdrawals rather than the account itself, and a creditbar cash advance would have run into the same wall. What we would actually pack:
- two cards on different networks (one Visa, one Mastercard)
- a small amount of local currency bought before departure
- the bank’s foreign number saved offline, not in the browser
- a note of the daily withdrawal cap, which is often lower abroad
“You can always get cash back at a till”
This one holds up better than expected, with caveats. Supermarkets in Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands will hand over twenty or fifty euros on a card purchase, and the exchange rate is the bank’s ordinary rate rather than the marked-up one a stand-alone machine charges. The catch is that cashback runs on the same card rails as everything else, so if your card is the problem, the till is not the solution. In the second week of August, a cash machine near Albufeira charged 3.50 euros on a 50 euro withdrawal. Add the bank’s own fee on top and you are paying restaurant-markup money for your own cash. The machine does not care.
When the card is dead and the phone is at four percent, the shortest route is often a counter rather than a screen, and a service like a short-term cash loan is one of the few that will look at a person rather than a chip. This is a loan. It accrues interest from the day it lands, and if the repayment date falls after your next student finance instalment, you have simply moved the emergency two weeks down the road. Use it for the bus to the airport and the sandwich, not the weekend. If the figure you need has three digits before the decimal, the honest move is to call home and eat the awkward conversation.
“Worst case, Western Union is instant”
True, and the fees are worse than the ads suggest. A transfer of 100 euros from the UK to Portugal in peak season costs the sender around 5 to 8 euros depending on how it is paid, and the cash is collectable within minutes at a post office or an agent counter, of which there are plenty even in small resort towns. The failure mode is not speed, it is opening hours: agents in beach resorts shut at 19:00 in August, and the ones that stay open are behind a queue of exactly the people you would expect. Airport money desks, meanwhile, quoted us a rate roughly 11 percent off the interbank mid-market one in mid-August, which on 200 euros is a lost lunch.
At two in the morning, the phone app wins on speed and loses on cost. What decides the damage is simpler than speed: whether the next guaranteed deposit into your account lands before the interest does. Check that date first. read more
