Sending a bank transfer to France..

[AnonymousBird]

I need to pay a deposit for our French holiday. It's a very small place, they don't take credit cards but have a bank account.

Is there a cheap way to send from my UK bank account to their french bank account? No great need for speed, so if there is a few days' delay for a cheaper fee then that is fine.

Thanks!

Try post office international transfers as i think they were cheapest but its quite complicated. We ended up using our bank but it cost about £25 in fees plus a not great exchange rate. We just wrote it off as a cost of the holiday but v annoying not to be able to use credit cards.

You should be able to send a relay payment from your account - takes a few days but only about £10 (there's a limit to how much you can send though).

I have used Transferwise for small sums and saved a packet. REcommended by moneysaving expert

You could also look at HiFX which we used to send money to our daughter when she was a student in Germany. That worked a treat and is pretty cheap. I did send some cash (?70 in real notes) for a holiday deposit in France like yours a few years ago by the Post Office tracked method. It got "lost". I think we got £46 or something back - the maximum value without additional insurance. The French recipient was told by the French post office that it was "illegal" to send cash through the post. The UK post office said that was rubbish. Doesn't explain why anyone thought it was OK to steal it though.

Thank you everyone. In the end, my bank actually didn't charge anywhere near as much as I thought, and the exchange rate was ok, so it was more competitive using them than I thought it would be!

But thanks for the replies, it is really good to know what alternatives there are out there. Post Office looked very easy to process but the exchange rate was terrible and on today's rates it was going to cost MORE with them, even "no fee" than with my bank....

You should be able to do a direct transfer from your bank account. It doesn't cost much. I send money to my UK account every month. For a holiday deposit it is likely to be much cheaper that way than using a third party. If you were sending 10000s to buy a house or something it would be different.

Ah x posts ;-)