Revolut card in Italy?

[StartingAgainFGS]

This is probably a silly question but I've only ever been to Spain. I used a revolut card for everything there...will it be ok to do the same in Italy?

DS used his revolute card all over Europe.

Excellent thank you!

You can use it all over the world

I've used all over Europe. The only place I couldn't use it was on a ryanair plane.

Yes, Revolut is great for using abroad because you can exchange currency on it and use local currency

Yep, never any issues in Italy. I used Revolut to send money to my son each month when he lived there and he used it as his min bank account there, did all of his spending on it.

I liked being able to move money over in small amounts from my normal account, so if the revolut card was lost or stolen it wasn't too much of a big deal!

Hope you don’t mind me hijacking this thread but it’s reminded that I don’t quite get how Revolut works. What is the difference between transferring some money from pounds to another currency in your account vs simply tapping with the Revolut card which only has pounds loaded but choosing to pay in local currency? Is it simply that the currency rate calculation is done at the time in the latter situation?

Yes, that's exactly it. You can play at being a currency speculator with your couple of hundred quid if you think that whichever currency you are about to convert to is going to go up by more than the conversion percentage, but you can also just leave it in pounds and spend it.

If you pay 20 Euros and you have 15 Euros in the Euro bit, it will take those and then convert however many pounds it needs to make 5 Euros more.

The main benefit is that the conversion costs something like 0.4% when your main bank will charge something like 2.5% for a foreign currency transaction. Plus as a PP mentioned it's like a "burner" card, so if you keep not too much money on it there's no huge downside even it gets both stolen and hacked (which really isn't a very likely scenario unless you are extremely careless with your PIN code or phone security).

Tbh for purchases, I don't understand the advantage of Revolut over the likes of Chase, which pays cashback, Kroo, which pays interest and Starling and Monzo plus some more standard banks, all of which allow fee free payments using a better exchange rate than Revolut, if they charge 0.4%.

They can also be operated like described as a separate account fed from a main account.

One thing that DS said was (& check that this is still current) that as he would ‘buy’ the currency he needed when he got to the relevant country but never at the weekend - as that’s when some charges apply. Obviously you still can trf whenever you want, but he said if you planned ahead and got it sorted in the week you would save money.

Honestly I don't fully understand it either

When I went to Spain I put money in the Euros bit of it.

My current account (RBS) now has a travel wallet feature, where it shows a separate "pot" for Euros, but i just was wary of losing my "main" bank card