Everyone likes going abroad – the exotic foods, the strange cultures, the prospect of being able to see the actual sun. But as ever with leaving the house, such activities cost money. When going abroad, it’s not quite as easy as handing over a crumpled note in your usual currency, safe in the knowledge that you understand the real price of things: instead, other countries outrageously choose to have their own currencies, and they expect you to use them while visiting. Furthermore, these often come in vastly different denominations than what you’re used to.
While it many not seem like real money while you’re frivolously paying for things, it can sometimes have a devastatingly unforeseen effect on your bank balance when you return home.
Tumbling currencies
A recent, well-earned holiday to Mexico was spent rooted to a barstool ordering margaritas ‘on the tab’. Looking at the 250-peso price on the menu seemed pretty meaningless to me – how much could a drink made primarily of tequila and lime juice, made in a country so rich in both ingredients, possibly cost? It would certainly be cheaper than in London, right?
Wrong. Upon paying my fortnight’s worth of bar and room service bills, printed on a never ending piece of paper that resembled the Bayeux Tapestry (did I really wash down breakfast with a piña colada most days?), I discovered that each of those margaritas seemingly cost around the same amount as a vintage bottle of champagne at the Ritz. Either that, or the barman had been taking full advantage of my inability to use a calculator.
In these times of economic mayhem, it is hard to get an estimate on how much things actually cost
Now, the last thing any traveller wants to do while they’re on holiday is feverishly check the current exchange rate to make sure they know what they’re paying for a hotel bar’s signature cocktail, but in these times of economic mayhem it is hard to get an estimate on how much things actually cost: at the start of this year, the Swiss franc soared by 30 percent on the back of a decision not to peg it to the euro, meaning that any time a Swiss fashionista popped over the border to, say, Milan, they would find that the expensive Italian handbag they’d budgeted for was even more ludicrously overpriced than usual.
A single solution
It’s not all bad, however. Such is the pace with which things move that a British holidaymaker flying to Greece on holiday might find that during the nearly four-hour flight between London and Athens, whichever government was in charge of the embattled birthplace of democracy might have missed yet another debt deadline and been booted out of the eurozone. Upon landing, the lucky traveller could find that instead of enjoying a long weekend renting a villa on an island in the Aegean, they are in fact able to buy the whole of Corfu.
But really, who can ever remember whether the dollar is high or low? Or how many zeros should be added to an Indian rupee when calculating the exchange rate? Or whether the euro has collapsed completely in the last five minutes?
To solve the terrible problem of morons like myself failing to pay attention to exchange rates, I propose something that I suspect may not be particularly popular in the current climate – a single currency. Not just for Europe, however, but for the entire world. That way, travellers would know exactly how much a cup of coffee – or a margarita – actually is, without having to whip out a calculator first to make sure they’re not being ripped off.
