travelex cards in southern and east africa (Travelex Pre-paid Travel Card)

Member Name: zambezi

Product:	Travelex Pre-paid Travel Card
Date:	20/08/08 (592 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: flexible - cash at any time

Disadvantages: sometimes the cash machines are down dont rely as your only funds

I work as a tour leader in africa. i use my travelex card throughout east and southern africa including kenya, tanzania, malawi, uganda, zambia, zimbabwe, botswana, south africa at visa cash machines and in some larger stores. It works well as long as you dont rely on it as your only source of cash as some times the visa machines are offline for international transactions. It is more flexible than travellers cheques here wich are often hard to cash and subject to poor exchange rates. The only place i dont use it is zimbabwe where the forex rates on the card make it unusable but that is true for any credit card or tc. I would reccomend it to bring alongside a good stock of post 2000 us dollars (the one with the large heads on them). Really the key is to have a number of different sources of cash here so when one doesnt work you can use the other.

Summary: really helpful to reduce the ammount of cash you carry