Alpicella

I will be traveling to Italy for the first
time. Is is better to purchase Euro Dollars
in the US? Do the airports in Italy and Munich accept Euro dollars? Any information
you may have on Atm Cards or Travel Money
Cards would be appreciative. I plan on visiting Verona,Pisa, Venice and Rome.
Thank you in advance for any suggestions,
you may have.

LoveItaly

Dear Alpicella, the Euro is the currency of Germany and Italy so yes, the airports in those countries will accept Euros.

Some people like to have about a $100.00 worth of Euro when they arrive in Europe so they do not have to bother finding and using the ATM when the get off the flight in Europe. Talk to your bank about helping you with that.

I do not understand your question about any information about ATM Cards. Do you have one now?

For Europe you will need an ATM card that is connected with your checking account. European ATM's do not work with ATM cards connected with saving accounts. You will need an ATM card that has 4 numbers. The ATM's in Europe do not have letters on their keyboards so if your current ATM card Pin is in letters change it to numbers.

Alpicella, do you have a credit card? Ideally you should have one also, to charge hotels and restaurant bills. Do make sure that they charge you in Euro's not US dollars on your credit cards bills.

Have fun planning your trip to Italy. Best wishes.

Melissa5

Here is our experience with ATM cards in Italy last summer. We had 3 ATM cards. The ATM machines would allow each card a maximum of 250 euros per day. (Our bank refused to raise the daily limit, they said they don't do that.) These were NOT check cards, and they were NOT credit cards, just simple ATM cards.

Some ATM machines did not take our cards at all...we had to search for the machines with the right symbols.

In addtion, out of our 3 ATM cards, for no reason that we can figure out, one of these cards never worked at all in Italy; the second card worked until about 2 days before the trip ended, then it stopped working. The 3rd card worked for about half of the trip and then stopped working. There was money in all of these accounts, so it was not a problem with insufficient funds. We have no idea why this occurred.

We needed enough daily cash for a family of 5.

We also had credit cards, but they are NOT ATM cards. We used them at the hotels mostly. Some smaller hotels prefer cash.

isabel

I have been to Europe (including Italy and Germany) many times and always use ATM cards to get cash.

Re the PIN number: it is not true anymore than your PIN must have only 4 digits. One of mine has 5 digits and it works fine, has been for the past four years. It is true that the key pads don't have letters, only numbers. However, you don't have to change your PIN, just memorize what digit the letter corresponds to. In other words, if your PIN has an "A" then you would type a "2".

Re the cards sometimes not working. I have had problems with my cards not working in a certain ATM but it is usually temporary. Example, one card didn't work when I got to the airport in Paris last year so I used my other one. But about twenty minutes later I tried the first card in a different ATM and it worked. Another time my husband's ATM didn't work and I tried mine (in that case it was the same account) and it worked. His worked OK the next time we tried. I have heard that some US banks shut down their ATM operating computers for maintaince for a few minutes in the middle of the night (which is morning in Europe) and that's why it might not work. I don't know if this is ture or not but it makes sense.

ira

Hi alp,

There are no Euro Dollars.

The currency in much of Europe is the euro. This is what you will use in Munich and in Italy.

The travel money cards are loaded with fees. You are much better off with 2 ATM cards. Open a second bank account and put 1/2 your travel money in that one.

Your bank will charge you to use an "out of network" ATM. Ask them what their fee is. Mine charges 75 cnts.

The banks in Europe do not charge for ATMs.

Your bank will have a daily limit of about $300 for ATM withdrawls. You can have it raised if necessary.

Do not bring traveler's checks except as emergency back up, they are too difficult and expensive to cash.

You should also have 2 credit cards.

May I suggest that, instead of Pisa, you visit Orvieto? It is about 1 hr by train from Rome.

motor_city_girl

Second ira's suggestion of Orvieto! Our bank did raise our limit but you can still only take 230 - 250 euro out PER transaction.

Also, never figured out if this is true but we were told to change our pin before we left because it started with a zero.

We took about 200 euro with us and about 400 euro travelers checks, which we ended up using at some of our hotels that wanted cash/travelers checks. I bought them at AAA before we left.

We also had experiences with our card not working at some ATMs but we just went to the next one on the block and were fine. We ran into two that did not offer English and had to fight with the machine to get our card back. Luckily we did both times.