On a birding trip to Namibia in March-April ’10, my wife, Kathy, and I had to purchase some safari clothing. We went to Safariland/Holtz (Gustav Voigts Centre, 129 Independence Ave., Windhoek, Namibia; ), which is a medium-sized store crammed with a wide selection of safari clothing and other gear.

On our travels overseas I have never applied for a VAT (value added tax) refund, but since the VAT of 15% was a fairly significant amount in this case, I saved the receipt on the chance...

The May edition of ITN had five pages of letters from subscribers’ telling the difficulties they had using magnetic-stripe debit and credit cards from the United States in Europe.

My husband and I have been traveling the world for 40 years, and we were leaving on May 1 for London, Paris and Brugge. These reports caused us a great deal of anxiety and we almost canceled our trip.

Never in our two weeks abroad — in hotels, small places of business, metro stations,...

When traveling, I have always depended upon getting funds in the local currency by using my ATM card, a debit Visa card with a local credit union.

In Brugge, Belgium, in March ’10, I tried, unsuccessfully, to withdraw funds with my card. I tried several banks’ machines, but the machines would not even read the card; I got the message “Unable to access card information” and the card was returned to me.

I went into one of the banks and was told that they couldn’t help me because...