Travel Currency Guide is written by Steve and Christine Meyer, a husband and wife team who have spent the last two decades traveling the world while building careers in banking. The site splits along the line their experience splits along. Steve writes the reference tier, the country, bank, airport and ATM guides, where the questions are about what a transaction costs and who is charging it. Christine writes the city guides and the blog, where the questions are about whether a payment method will be accepted at all. Every page carries the byline of whichever of them wrote it, so you can see whose work you are reading and hold it to account.
Steve Meyer
Country Guides and ATM Guides
Steve has spent 20 years traveling the world, from ATM hunting in Buenos Aires to Seven Bank runs in Tokyo, and brings 20+ years of banking experience to every guide he writes. His subject is the plumbing: which entity actually charges you, and at which step. A single foreign withdrawal can carry an operator surcharge from the machine's owner, a non-network fee from your own bank, a foreign-transaction percentage on the converted amount, and a dynamic currency conversion markup applied before your card network ever sees the transaction. Those are four different charges levied by four different parties, and most travel advice collapses them into one number. Steve's pages take them apart, because which one you are being charged determines what, if anything, you can do about it.
What he writes. Steve carries the byline on 484 pages: the 192 country guides, the 114 bank guides, the 102 airport guides, the 75 deep-dive ATM guides, and the site's canonical explainer on dynamic currency conversion. In practice that means the reference layer of the site, the pages you read before a trip rather than during one.
Representative work. The Global ATM Alliance explainer and the Alliance checker tool came out of a long-running problem: the partner list published in most travel articles is wrong, and it is wrong in a way that costs people money at the machine. The Tokyo ATM guide is the template the other ATM deep dives follow, and the Argentina country guide is where the gap between an official rate and a parallel one gets treated seriously rather than waved at.
How he works. A fee claim on one of Steve's pages comes from the institution's own published schedule or it does not go on the page. Three automated checks run over the guides before anything ships, including one that tests every Bank of America Alliance claim on the site against the bank's own partner list. The methodology page sets out the rules in full, including what happens when a check catches something that was already published.
Christine Meyer
City Guides and Travel Blog
Christine has spent 20 years traveling internationally and pairs that experience with 20+ years working in banking. Her subject is the part that no fee schedule can tell you: whether the thing actually works when you are standing there. A card can carry no foreign-transaction fee and still be refused by a Tokyo restaurant, a Munich bakery, or a taxi driver who has decided the terminal is broken today. Payment habits are local, they vary by neighbourhood inside a single city, and they change faster than published guidance does. Christine's pages are about acceptance and custom rather than pricing: what to hand over, how much, and to whom.
What she writes. Christine carries the byline on 195 pages: the 154 city guides and the 41 posts in the travel blog. Where Steve's tier is what you read before you book, hers is what you read on the plane or in the taxi.
Representative work. The Buenos Aires city guide is the neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood template the rest of the city tier is built on. Best debit cards for international travel is the post readers act on most, and the card-declined series grew out of the single most common question readers write in with, which is not what a card costs but why it just stopped working.
How she works. Acceptance claims are the ones most likely to go stale, so they get written narrowly and dated. Where a city has moved (Sweden's shops turning away notes, Denmark retiring banknote series, Bavaria staying stubbornly cash-only) the page says when that was true rather than stating it as permanent. Corrections are handled under the same published policy as the fee pages.
How We Write These Guides
Every guide on Travel Currency Guide is built from a combination of personal travel experience, bank and card-network research, and ongoing updates as fees, exchange rates, and ATM networks change. We do not take payments to recommend specific banks or ATMs. We do earn affiliate commission on a small set of clearly disclosed partners (Wise, CEI Currency Exchange, Surfshark), and those partnerships never determine which methods we rank highest. See our affiliate disclosure for the full list, and how we verify fees for the sourcing rules, the automated checks that run before publication, and what happens when we find an error.
Contact
Spotted an outdated fee or a bank that no longer accepts foreign cards? We update guides regularly and welcome corrections. Reach us through the contact form on our homepage.