Credit Card - Overseas Use

[bad company]

I wasn’t sure whether to post this here on in the holidays & travel section.

I’ve had a BA American Express card for several years . The Avios points are useful and pay for Mrs BC and I to fly to the USA business class once a year. The downsides are the £300 annual fee and 3% FOREX fee (actually 2.99%) which means that I don’t use the card while abroad so about half of card spend doesn’t earn Avios.

Now I have a new Lloyds Ultra Credit card paying me 1% cash back for the first year on purchases anywhere in the world. I used to use the Chase debit card card but that’s not paying so much now.

So I’m wondering if it’s worth keeping the Amex card or is there anything better?

[Austin Prefect]

Try a gold Amex. Cheaper than your BA card, membership points convert to avios, and you get some priority pass vouchers. Platinum has good perks for travelling including travel insurance, but someone I know has one and seems to be constantly calculating how to make the perks justify the membership fee.

Or do what I do and get the free BA Amex but it's not quite so good for earning flights.

https://www.headforpoints.com/2025/07/29/what-is-t...

Edited by Austin Prefect on Monday 27th April 19:11

[bad company]

Austin Prefect said:

Try a gold Amex. Cheaper than your BA card, membership points convert to avios, and you get some priority pass vouchers. Platinum has good perks for travelling including travel insurance, but someone I know has one and seems to be constantly calculating how to make the perks justify the membership fee.

Or do what I do and get the free BA Amex but it's not quite so good for earning flights.

https://www.headforpoints.com/2025/07/29/what-is-t...

Edited by Austin Prefect on Monday 27th April 19:11

Don’t all of those Amex cards incur the 3% FOREX fee? As I see it Amex has FOREX fees and an annual charge. The Lloyds card has no annual fee and offers cash back.

[craig1912]

Barclaycard Avios plus? Just got one.

Also looking at linking to Curve to avoid overseas fees.

[Panamax]

I have a Halifax Clarity credit card that's used exclusively outside UK. No fees. Details on this link.
https://www.halifax.co.uk/creditcards/travel.html?...

No non-sterling purchase fees.
No cash withdrawal fees.
When you spend abroad, Visa or Mastercard will set the exchange rate on that day.

[Jakg]

You won't beat the Lloyds card.

[bad company]

Panamax said:

I have a Halifax Clarity credit card that's used exclusively outside UK. No fees. Details on this link.
https://www.halifax.co.uk/creditcards/travel.html?...

No non-sterling purchase fees.
No cash withdrawal fees.
When you spend abroad, Visa or Mastercard will set the exchange rate on that day.

The Lloyds card has all of that and has cash back.

[bmwmike]

HSBC has a global money account in case thats any use. I use it for euros and dollars but supports lots of currencies. Works really well but no points etc. No fee either though.

[craig1912]

bad company said:

The Lloyds card has all of that and has cash back.

Reading through everything it looks like the LLoyds card is the new Clarity card which I’ve had for years!

[Panamax]

Wake up people - Lloyds and Halifax are the same organisation! It just happens that mine is a Halifax card.

[Jakg]

Panamax said:

Wake up people - Lloyds and Halifax are the same organisation! It just happens that mine is a Halifax card.

...except the Lloyds card pays cashback, unlike the Halifax one...

[craig1912]

Jakg said:

...except the Lloyds card pays cashback, unlike the Halifax one...

And a much lower APR if you don’t pay it off every month.

[bad company]

Jakg said:

Panamax said:

Wake up people - Lloyds and Halifax are the same organisation! It just happens that mine is a Halifax card.

...except the Lloyds card pays cashback, unlike the Halifax one...

My point exactly. Why would anyone care if they’re in the same ownership.

I have the Lloyds card which will replace my Halifax card. Moving on I wonder if it’ll prove too generous so that the benefits get scaled back. That’s what happened with the Chase debit card.

[alangla]

bad company said:

My point exactly. Why would anyone care if they re in the same ownership.

I have the Lloyds card which will replace my Halifax card. Moving on I wonder if it ll prove too generous so that the benefits get scaled back. That s what happened with the Chase debit card.

A cautionary tale: I took an Ultra card to replace my Clarity for exactly the same reason of wanting baseline cashback as well as all the other features of the Clarity card. Up till recently the cashback offers were different for Clarity and Ultra, so I kept the dormant Clarity card for the odd occasions where it had a better cashback offer than Ultra. Recently Lloyds harmonised all the offers (down the way!) so I decided to close the Clarity account. Unfortunately, this seems to have caused my cashback to go haywire, it disappeared from the Lloyds app and just showed an error for a week and when it came back the recent offers I’d used had completely vanished along with the pending cashback! My running total of base cashback is still there though. The chat function in the Lloyds app is worse than useless, 1 hour plus to get a response to each individual message and at the end the agent told me to phone. On phoning it was just a lengthy queue with no estimate of when it might be answered other than “over 20 minutes”. Lloyds now have a written complaint to handle as a result.

TLDR: if you’ve got Clarity and Ultra just freeze the Clarity card instead of closing it and don’t expect any sort of customer service from Lloyds