Your guide to the ANZ Travel Card

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Note: As of April 2022, the ANZ Travel Card has already been decommissioned and is no longer available.

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The ANZ Travel Card is a reloadable and prepaid Visa card that supports multiple foreign currencies and lets you lock in an exchange rate. Its a competitor of the Qantas Travel Money Card and the Velocity Global Wallet, although the ANZ card doesn’t offer rewards or frequent flyer points.

What are the fees and charges with the ANZ Travel Card?

Here are the important numbers you need to know.

Card type	Prepaid debit card
Minimum initial load	A$200
Unsupported currency fee	4% of the transaction value
ATM withdrawal fee	A$3.50, US$2.50, £2.00, €2.20, NZ$4.50, CAD$3.00, HKD$20.00, SGD$4.00, THB 95, JPY 260
Maximum amounts	A$50,000 at a time. No more than A$50,000 loaded a year. Maximum of A$9,000 per transaction via Post Billpay, or A$25,000 per transaction via ANZ
Activity Alerts fee	A$0.35 per SMS

There are no other associated fees with owning, reloading or holding an inactive ANZ Travel Card account. However, ANZ may add commissions to its exchange rates when converting currencies.

How does the ANZ Travel Card work?

ANZ’s card supports Australian Dollars, US Dollars, Euros, British Pounds, New Zealand Dollars, Hong Kong Dollars, Canadian Dollars, Singapore Dollars, Thai Baht and Japanese Yen.

In comparison, Qantas Travel money also has United Arab Emirates dirhams (AED) while the Velocity Global Wallet supports South African Rand as a reloadable currency.

For existing ANZ Travel Card holders, here’s how to use it:

1. Load or reload your card through the ANZ online portal, over the phone, in-person at a branch, or via Post Billpay.
2. Choose the currencies you wish to load to, keeping in mind the conversion rates from the Australian Dollar. For unsupported currencies, it’s best to just leave it as Australian Dollars.
3. Use your card online or overseas. It’s accepted at more than 38 million merchants and 2.3 million ATMs worldwide, wherever Visa is accepted.
4. Reload your card or cash out once you are finished.

Access the ANZ foreign exchange calculator to see what daily rates may apply to currency conversions that you perform.

How does the ANZ Travel Card compare?

Within Australia, all the competing reloadable travel money cards are broadly similar in terms of their fees and charges. The main point of difference is the exchange rate for the various wallets.

As a data point, here are some sample conversion rates across a range of travel money cards on 20 October 2020. The best travel card rate is bolded and the official Visa exchange rate of the date is included at the bottom for further comparison.

	AUD to USD	AUD to GBP	AUD to EUR
ANZ Travel Card	0.6877	0.5287	0.5811
Qantas Travel Money Card	0.6753	0.5161	0.5677
Velocity Global Wallet	0.6630	0.5123	0.5630
Visa official exchange rate	0.7056	0.5444	0.5999

In this test, the ANZ Travel Card consistently offered the highest rate compared to the Qantas Travel Money card and the Velocity Global Wallet card. To be fair though, those latter two cards earn frequent flyer points on transactions whereas the ANZ card doesn’t

Summing up

Although the ANZ Travel Card isn’t available to new customers anymore, existing users should still hang onto their for now. What you lose with the lack of rewards points is a slightly better exchange rate on currency conversions, which saves you more money in the long term.

Of course, the best option overall is to ditch prepaid travel cards overall and use a credit card without any overseas transaction fees. That means you can take advantage of the higher Visa or Mastercard official exchange rate, while not incurring additional fees on cross-border purchases.

Frequently asked questions