Paying by debit/credit card

[norhel]

Hey everyone.

 

Just wondering how common it is to pay by credit card in Warnemunde, Tallinn, Helsinki and St. Petersburg?

I'm going on a cruise there later this year, and I'm looking into if I need to bring any cash or not? I usually only buy some chocolate in the ports.

 

Thanks

[LondonTowner]

We always have a supply of Euros, but on our Baltic cruise paid everything with a CC with no fees for foreign transactions.

[GradUT]

The euro is the currency used in Warnemuende (Germany), Tallin (Estonia) and Helsinki (Finland) and the euro is accepted in all the tourist shops in St. Petersburg.

 

If your purchases are going to be limited to chocolate, I suggest you obtain some euros and pay cash for those purchases. Some shops may have a minimum requirement you must buy in order to use a credit card (because it costs them money to process credit card transactions). Your chocolate purchases may not reach that minimum amount.

[MATHA531]

Almost all merchants in touristy type areas will take credit cards; street vendors might not. The euro is the currency in Germany, Estonia, and Finland so it doesn't hurt to have some euro with you; however ATM's are plentiful and you can always use your debit or ATM card to pull out some euro if required although you should check with your bank as to fees. It hardly pays to withdraw €20 if your bank charges a $5 fee for the withdrawal plus possibly a foreign transaction fee.

 

As far as Denmark, the official currency is the Danish kroner but euro are widely accepted. You will be at the mercy of whatever exchange rate the merchant wants to use and again of course in touristy areas, acceptance of credit cards is pretty much universal.

 

Now Sweden is in the process of doing away with the use of cash. For the record, the official currency is the Swedish Kroner, a completely different currency than Denmark although they both have the same way (just like the currencies of the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand are all called dollars). You will find, believe it or not, that in Sweden, the use of cash is frowned upon and they will expect you to pay with a card for a cup of coffee so I wouldn't bother with Swedish kroner.

 

Russia? For the most part few people do St. Petersburg on their own an usually are on some kind of a tour where they will take you to stores which will take cards and/or euro or US dollars of British pounds.

[norhel]

Thanks for your comments.

We've been to Stockholm and Copenhagen many times before, so there were gonna use our card.

I'm probably also gonna use my card as much as possible at the rest of the places and have a few euro's in cash.