Preferred to be billed in baht

My wife and I took our seventh trip in eight years to Thailand, Dec. 5, 2009-Jan. 13, 2010, and we noticed something new regarding paying for hotel rooms with a credit card.

In the past, when we paid for our room using our credit card, we always were charged in Thai baht, and, of course, by using a Capital One credit card we avoided the currency-exchange fee as charged by all the other card issuers.

This year, however, we noticed that right on the credit card slip that one is asked to sign, a conversion had been made to US dollars, with two notations. The first tells you that the exchange rate includes a minimum of a 2.5% “hedging fee.” The second notation is your acknowledgement that you have been given a choice of which currency you will be billed in.

When I pointed out to the clerk that I had not, in fact, been given a choice, since if I signed the slip it would be billed at the unfavorable rate, and that I wanted to be billed in Thai baht, the clerk destroyed the original slip and ran my card a second time with only the amount in baht showing.

This happened three times on three charges at our Bangkok hotel and once at our hotel in Chiang Mai. We did not notice this billing scam in any of the 30-plus restaurants we went to, but we remained alert for it whenever we paid by credit card.

ARTHUR CARLSON

Laredo, TX