I noticed something disturbing about international payments the other day. I thought it might be worth sharing as a warning to expats and travellers.
We bought plane tickets online from an Australian airline, QANTAS. The prices listed on the website, in our confirmation and receipts were in Australian dollars. We paid with an Australian credit card. You’d think that would be fairly straight forward. But, no.
QANTAS in its infinite wisdom had decided that since we were in Europe it would change the price it charged into Euros for us. QANTAS didn’t ask us or even tell us it was converting the price to Euros. So, naturally our Australian bank charged us a fee of AU$150 for converting the cost of the payment from Euros back to Australian Dollars. We had no idea QANTAS had converted the currency until this fee turned up in our account.
Excuse me QANTAS, but that’s bloody ridiculous.
(It’s also possibly illegal, since all my receipts say AU$ I should fully expect to be charged in AU$).
I appreciate that for many customers this would be helpful. However, if you’re going to be smart and work out where people are, why don’t you be a little smarter and ASK what they want. A little pop-up saying “We’ve noticed you’re European, would you like to convert this payment into Euros?” would have been sensible. We could have said no – others could say yes. But at least QANTAS would be keeping everyone happy. ASK. Just because you know where we are doesn’t mean you know what we want.
Anyway, I realised this might not be a problem with just QANTAS so I thought I’d share the story as a warning to expats, tourism operators and web designers everywhere.
Recently I also had a similar rant about how annoying it is when websites change the language settings according to where you are. As a traveller in Europe, a resident in a multi-language country or an expat who’s still learning the new language, this is especially annoying. Note to web designers: ASK.
Image Credit: Simon Sees
