I often compare the excange rates available from the many ways of sending money to Thailand.

One of the cheapest is to people who have a visa card and can go to their bank and request a withdrawl is made from their card and a deposit made to their bank account. This can be done for amounts in excess of £10000. And should provide exchange rates close or better than interbank.

I have been using a URL Topfield (now banned, why?) provded :

http://corporate.visa.com/pd/consumer_serv...HB&rate=0.0

However, now Visa have upfated this site and this service is no longer available.

Anyway after contacting Visa, there is an alternative service which seems to be better as you can enter the percentage charge your bank will make for foreign transations :

www.fanwithaplan.com

So, if you have a nationwide pvisa debit card, you can be safe in mind that you are getting one of the best possible rates. However, be very careful that nationwide dont know that you can make large withdrawls via visa to your thai bank account as they are losing out and may do something about it. I vaguely spoke to nationwide about this and they had never heard of it. This is the best way to keep it !

HTH

PS What is interesting is if you compare the spreads Thai banks have against SWIFT (TT) transfers to that of the Visa rates - then you will see that for transfers of around £20000 you could be saving over £350+ !

Visa rocks

I've been monitoring several exchange rates now for over 1 month - for THB and MYR - and the winner is Visa. It is virtually (or better than) the interbank rate.

When you do the caclulations on a small sized transfer (eg £20K) there is a loss of £250 when using most Malaysian banks for MYR compared to using the Visa deposit into bank accuount. Thai banks typically dont have the same spread as Malaysian banks. Nevertheless, the loss on TT transfers for £20K could be around £170 compared to Visa rates. Not insignificant !