sorry if this is a silly question, but how easy are travellers cheques to use in canada

for instance when i went to america (new york and orlando) on hols earlier this year, all shops/hotels/resturants we went to accepted US$ travellers cheques as payment without having to exchange them into US cash,

is it the same in Canada if i get canadian dollar travellers cheques, or will i still have to exchange them at a bank/beauru du change? as i am trying to work out wether it will be better for me to take canadian dollar travellers cheques or british pound travellers cheques (i am from the UK) or just canadian dollars cash.

i will be based from banff if that makes a difference

Hi Anna, If you are going to take travellers cheques at all, I'd say bring them in Canadian dollars. That way stores will be able to just cash them without having to do any conversions. If you brought pounds, I'd think you'd have to go to a bank to get them changed.

Most people I know, don't use them anymore. Have you thought about using an ATM bank machine? If you open an account with Barclays bank in Britain, you can make withdrawels here at ScotiaBank for free. Scotiabanks are very common here, so not hard to find.
Using ATM's will give you the best exchange rate and you won't have to carry around large sums of money of travellers cheques.

Kodi is right, particularly about Scotia Bank. The last time I was in Canada I used ATMs and my credit card exclusively. Scotia Bank branches were fairly easy to find. As I recall there is an ATM locator on the Scotia Bank web site. Interestingly enough, I first found out about the locator from Kodi.

As for cashing traveler's checks, there may well be a fee. On my last trip, I had to go inside the bank once to use an aTM, and I noticed that there were fees to cash traveler's checks. The scale was graduated: Canadian checks were the lowest fee, then US dollar checks, and then "foreign" checks. I did not define "foreign," but logically it was non Canadian, non US. Whether or not £ checks were classed as "foreign" I do not know.

If you acquire your checks in Canadian dollar form, I am fairly sure you will pay to get them. Often in the USA, the bank selling them claims "no fee." Well, that is a play on words because the exchange rate is adjusted about 5% against the buyer relative to the interbank exchange rate.

As for the utility of the checks, I really don't know for sure. Although I have visited Canada many times in the last 20 years, the last time I converted an American Express check was in 1987.

Although I carry a few hundred dollars in TC form as a doomsday defense, we have used our credit cards and aTM cards exclusively since 1987.

Some of those traveler's checks have made 7 round trips to Europe and an equal number to "Canada!

Until my bank, Bank of America, started socking us with a $5.00 fee for off net ATM usage, I could go to any ATM and get money. Now, to avoid the $5.00 fee, I have to go to Scotia Bank. Fortunately, Scotia is a large bank with many branches.

The only place I have have any difficulty at all was around Lake Louise and along the Icefields Parkway in the Canadian Rockies. The ATMs in that region were not operated by a normal bank; some non-bank concessioner owned and stocked them with currency. It turned out that I could not have used those independent machines even if I had wanted to because they were Cirrus and my ATM card was Plus. Also, there would have been a fee to use them had my ATM card been the right gender.

To some extent you need to know the terrain so to speak, but between my credit card and my ATM card there has never been any real problem.

If I have excess cash at the end of the trip, I usually use it to pay either my last night's hotel bill or a restaurant meal. And of course there are always little items I don't really need at the airport but I buy them anyhow.

I assume from the quality of your letter that you are a young person and this is just to let you know that we old foggies have long since given up on traveller's cheques. You get lousy exchange rates on them. It is much easier to take ,say, $200 Canadian dollars in your pocket and then use ATM machines. Banff has plenty of them. If you still insist on taking cheques, get them in Canadian dollars.

Banff does not have a Scotiabank. It looks like the closest one is in Canmore, which is about a 10-15 minute drive.
We purchased a Visa TravelMoney Card, which is a pre-paid card that works great in ATMs (with a fee for each withdrawal) and in stores. Similar to t.c.'s but convienent as you can use it in ATMs after banking hours. We purchased it in Canada and used it on a trip to Europe last year. This works much better than traveller's cheques (which we seemed to have problems with on several trips in the US). You may have something similar in the UK?
Banff shops, restaurants etc however will likely be really accomodating with travellers' cheques.

How much over the interbank exchange rate did you pay?

I will guess it was 5%.

In other words, if a euro was $1.50 C per unit at the interbank rate, I guess that you paid close to $1.57 per euro to acquire the card.

If you bought $1,000 worth, you might have paid $50 for the convenience.

thanks everyone for the replies, i appreciate the help