Why This Page Exists
Travel money advice is unusually easy to get wrong and unusually hard to check. Fees are published in one place and repeated in a thousand others, the repetition outlives the original, and by the time a figure has been quoted for five years nobody remembers that the bank changed it in year two. Most of what circulates about foreign ATM charges is not invented. It is simply old.
This page describes what we do about that: where a number has to come from before it appears on a guide, what is checked automatically before anything is published, what happens when we find an error, and how quickly you should stop trusting any of it.
Where a Fee Number Has to Come From
The institution's own published schedule, or nothing. A bank's fee for using another bank's machine abroad comes from that bank's own fee schedule or account terms. An ATM operator's surcharge comes from the operator's disclosure or from the on-screen notice at the machine. A country's tourist tax or visa fee comes from the relevant government page. Aggregator sites, comparison tables and forum threads are useful for finding out that something has changed. They are never the source we cite.
Where a number is a range, we publish the range. Operator surcharges vary by machine and by country, and there is no honest single figure for "what an ATM charges in Spain". Where we can only give a band, we say so rather than picking a midpoint and presenting it as fact. A specific number that is wrong is worse than a range that is right.
Where a figure is dated, we date it. Fee schedules change without announcement. Anything we quote is a snapshot of a document on a day, and pages carry an update date so you can judge how much weight it deserves.
The Checks That Run Before Anything Is Published
An alliance audit against the source list. The Bank of America Global ATM Alliance is the single most misreported subject in travel money, so every claim we make about it on every page is checked automatically against Bank of America's own international partner locator. The check reports five kinds of failure: naming a partner that is not on the list, denying one that is, naming a bank that used to be a partner and no longer is, staying silent on a country that does have one, and the specific error of claiming the alliance waives Bank of America's 3% international transaction fee, which it never does. Our Global ATM Alliance checker is generated from the same list the audit uses, so the tool cannot drift away from the pages.
A duplication audit across sibling pages. A site with a guide for every country is under permanent pressure to say the same thing 191 times. We measure paragraph-level overlap between pages of the same type and treat anything above a set threshold as work to be done rather than a rounding error. The rule we hold ourselves to is that a procedural explanation belongs on one page and gets linked from the others, not restated.
A structural audit per destination. Before a country's set of pages goes live, an automated check confirms the pages exist, are registered in the sitemap and the relevant hub, carry an author byline and structured data, and actually link to one another. It is unglamorous and it catches the errors that come from doing the same job sixty times.
What none of this checks. An automated audit can prove that our pages agree with each other and with a source document. It cannot prove the source document is current, and it cannot notice that a bank quietly changed a fee last Tuesday. That is what the refresh policy below is for, and it is why the last line of every guide tells you to confirm with your own bank.
When We Find an Error
We correct errors in place, and we do not wait for a scheduled review to do it. Sometimes that is a single fee that moved. Twice in 2026 it was larger: a bank that had quietly left an ATM alliance years earlier and was still described as a member on our pages, and a set of pages that named the right number against the wrong fee. Both were found by auditing our own claims against the source documents rather than by waiting to be told, and both were fixed across every affected page rather than on the one page somebody happened to be reading.
That is the point of the automated checks above. On a site with a guide for every country, an error made once tends to be an error made in forty places, and the only practical defence is a machine that re-checks every claim against the source rather than a person who remembers writing it.
How Often Pages Are Refreshed
Every guide is treated as a maintained asset, not a finished one. Fee figures, bank branding, airport terminal layouts and ATM operator coverage all drift within a year. Each page carries an update date, and each is scheduled for a full re-verification on its own anniversary: fee numbers re-checked against source, closed branches and renamed products caught, internal links and structured data re-validated. The first full annual cycle falls due in April 2027, twelve months after the earliest guides on this site were published.
Corrections do not wait for the anniversary. When something material changes, or when a reader tells us we are wrong, the page is fixed and re-dated then. The two 2026 alliance corrections both happened this way rather than on a schedule.
What We Do Not Do
We do not take payment for placement. No bank, ATM operator or exchange service pays to be recommended, ranked higher, or described more favourably, and none has ever been offered the option.
We do earn affiliate commission, on a short and disclosed list. Wise, CEI Currency Exchange and Surfshark pay us if you sign up through our links. That is the site's revenue, we are not coy about it, and the full list is on our affiliate disclosure page. What it does not do is decide the advice: our guides tell you when a state-owned bank's own ATM is cheaper than anything we earn from, when a partner ATM beats the card we promote, and when the right answer is cash you brought with you.
We do not present a guess as a measurement. Where we have not been able to verify a figure, the page says what is known and what is not, rather than filling the gap with a plausible number.
Telling Us We Are Wrong
Almost every error we have fixed was found by auditing rather than by being told, which is not a boast: it means the reader-reported channel is underused. If a fee on this site does not match what your bank charged you, if a bank has left a network, or if a machine we recommend no longer exists, we would rather hear it than not. Contact details are on the about the authors page, which also explains who writes what.
And the standing caveat, which no amount of process removes: confirm the fee with your own bank before you rely on it. Every list on this site, including the ones we generate ourselves, is a snapshot of arrangements that keep moving.
Last updated: August 2026. Alliance partner list verified against Bank of America's international ATM partner locator on 17 August 2026.