I'm investigating Paypal as a means to transfer money from UK to Thailand. I've heard some horror stories about things going wrong. I tried to find the exchange rates on the website but maybe I can't see the wood for the trees. Ultimately I would like to compare the various fees against Swift or perhaps Moneybookers.

If you have a P/Pal account, then it's easy enough to find out the rate, etc

Just do a dummy run, but dont hit the final transaction button.

I just did so and, to "send" 5000 costs £94 if you pay the transfer fee of 50 Baht, instead of it being taken out at the other end.

As far as the exchange rates go, you will get this somewhere on the page (just now)

PayPal Conversion Rate as of 13 Nov 2009: 1 British Pound = 53.7041 Thai Baht

Which is slightly gouging when compared to the average exchange rate today of a little over 55 TBH-£ (TT rate)

Penkoprod

Simply put Paypal wil probably be OK for small transfers, but anything like actual living expenses use a swift transfer. Find a bank that will let you transfer your original currency to your destination bank and let the Thai bank do the currency exchange as the rate tends to be better, with larger amounts it will even exceed the swift transfer cost.

In Oz some banks will not allow you to transfer $AU and insist on doing the conversion using their usurerly exchange rates, or even worse they would only transfer $US so that meant they get 2 sets of foreign exchange fees. I changed banks, and transfer $AU to Thailand for the better rates and less fees overall. Look at the transaction from your wallet to the destination wallet.