Just an addendum that I saw my first ever "chip" machine in the US right here in LA in Westwood Village. It was at Target, but I did not use my chip card b/c I have a Target card and wanted my 5% discount! The clerk was showing the woman in front of me that a chip card goes into a different slot in the CC device.

My wife and I have had our cards "cloned" in America on several occasions never in the UK since pin numbers were introduced.
You can put a man on the moon but country wide chip.
47% of the worlds Credit Card fraud happens in the US
http://www.securitymagazine.com/arti...pens-in-the-us

Adding to socialworker's comments, while I understood that BofA now charges a 3% transaction fee for ATM use at their partner, Barclay's, I didn't realize exactly how steep that was until we returned!

But having knowledge of this from you Fodor's posters (who reads the fine print when our banks change the terms!), we did charge everything we could using our Capital One and Chase Sapphire cards.

Just an FYI, I went to my local BofA and expressed my disappointment and consternation to one of the people at the desks and got the entire $53 amount of the various fees credited back to our account.

In the future we will use our Schwab card.

I am referring to various ATM transaction fees that were somehow tacked on--which at first, I thought were foreign transaction fees--even though we did use partner banks only…..(we have a BofA Travel Rewards CC that does not have any foreign transaction fees.)

I will have to look back at the amounts of the ATM debit transaction amounts themselves, b/c it did appear that they were only charged at the going exchange rate, but I will double-check.

And I guess that since I am still not completely sure what fees BofA charges--the guy we spoke to was relatively clueless and I stopped trying to understand him once he had given me what I wanted--we will not use them for foreign debits anymore. That is what I meant above about using the Schwab card---we will use that as our only debit card from now on.

Thanks again for the tip, SW.

As an explanation for BofA, I took out £100. That was converted to $157.25, the bank rate. 5 years ago, before BofA changed their policy, using Barclay's, their partner bank, there was no fee on either side for using Barclay's atm machine. Now, BofA charges a 3% "transaction" fee, which according to my bank statement, was $4.72.

Not horrendous, but when I took out £400, I got hit with $18.77 in fees. Ouch!

The total fees on our statement were something like $53, and then we went to the bank and he said there was one more that hadn't yet appeared and so the actual total was $63. He refunded all of it....as a "courtesy".

Lesson learned regarding ever using that card in a foreign country!