Paying and ATMs in Thailand

Two things to keep in mind.
First, cash is gold in asia, and Thailand is a classic example. Yes, there are many places where you can pay with a card, but it depends what do you do on your holidays. Hotels, high end restaurants, shops are hustle free when paying by card. Just make sure you don’t use the conversion they offer.
If you eat street food, enjoy night life, use taxi, rent a scooter, shop at local moms&pops shops, don’t expect to use a card. Even if some of those places have POS terminals, they will charge you between 2-5% in order to use them…

Secondly
Be careful when using a card in back alley hotels, because what happened to me (1 time in Pattaya and 1 time in Laos), that when paying for the room with a card, their POS terminal was actually set in a way that withdrawals counted towards “money withdrawal”. If I used Revolut that would not make much of a difference, but since I used my home bank card that charges 12 EUR minimum for Visa credit card withdrawals, I was charged more for a fee, than the room costed. I did not even notice it until I got home. When I checked the payment slip again, it did actually say “withdrawal” in some small print.

I got use to always saying to cashiers in Thailand when paying with credit card “charge me in Thai Baht please” and it always works fine…

Have fun.