Don't know if this is helpful but if anyone is going abroad.

[bisdu]

......When we went on our last couple of trips we converted currency at our French bank and were hugely disappointed with how much we got for our euro..the commission was ludicrous.
This time we did a bit more shopping around and found an on line currency company in Paris. We used them ......did it all on line so quick and easy and got an extra $65 per thousand over and above the best the bank were prepared to offer.
2 days after we ordered it the money was delivered to our door.
They are called achat -or- devises.fr

[Marko Polo]

Is it/was it a better rate than one gets when one arrives in the destination country?

[Ali]

I'm always scared of carrying cash (not that I have any) so always used ATMs on travels for work, would be an interesting rate comparison.

[bisdu]

The rate was more favourable and normally I find as you can only get a smallish sum out from an ATM you need to make numerous withdrawls and get charged on every one. Also last time we were in the USA the bank blocked our card....there had be fraud on the account so the froze it....and it was saturday afternoon and a different time zone, and only sixpence to last us until the Tuesday. Don't want to find ourselves in that situation again so like to have some cash. Dollars are quite widely accepted in Vietnam , Cambodia and Burma so dollars was the answer.

[Marko Polo]

Ah, that explains it. But as Ali said, carrying cash can be a worry, though if you leave most of it in a safe place and only carry daily what you need it's less stressful.

[bisdu]

Most hotels have a safe in the room so excess can be left there. The rest I carry in a body belt under the clothes, and undetectable.....I know it's undetectable because at the airports, at the scanner , the woman who pats you down has failed to detect it.......don't know if that's just good for me or bad for airport security!