We’ve spoken in a couple of blogs about Travel Credit Cards, so let’s take a moment and talk about Travel Cards or Multi-currency cards, specifically the Travel Card by Al Ansari, which claims to provide the best rates. So do they really provide the best rates? Well, yes, they do provide the best rates in the current market, but does that mean that rate is the best you can get? The simple answer is nope.
Solutions like the Travel Card Al Ansari and the Travel Card from Al Fardan Exchange do provide a cashless method to make payments and also offer the best rates in the market. However, internationally, if you compare them with products like Revolut and Wise in Europe or Niyo Global in India, they do not even come close to those kinds of solutions.
Hence, the MENA region needs its own travel solution—a travel solution that can help a traveler do everything from planning their trip all the way to providing assistance during the complete journey as a travel companion.
While these travel cards don’t aim to do that, they aim to be plastic that provides you better rates than the market but still not the best, and hopefully provide the same benefits such as lounge access which you find in travel credit cards.
We envision it differently. We see a traveler having to spend countless hours planning a destination and then checking the prices, including hotels, tickets, and expenses within the country. After all this, they look into the visa barriers and get a visa appointment, and then before travel, they build an itinerary with the worry of not wanting to miss the best spots. Finally, they make a last-minute trip to an exchange house to get foreign currency cash and then manage that cash safely in a foreign country.
It is overwhelming; travel shouldn’t be this hard, right?
We aim to make this easier, much easier, but the problem we see today in front of us is that we still do not have the best and the cheapest way to make cashless payments in a foreign country, which becomes a problem for GCC travelers.
That’s why we decided to tackle that first and also started finding out how we can ensure you get the best deals on hotels and flights without having to search on multiple platforms. So we also launched hotel bookings with our prices being up to 15% cheaper compared to Booking.com and Agoda.
That’s the change we aim to bring, which none of the other travel cards will ever bring, and we want to ensure we build every feature with the customer pain points in mind.
So what are you waiting for? Join our waitlist today, and we aim to launch the MVP of our travel card to a small group of users soon. You can already get great deals on your next hotel booking using TravelersPay.
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