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I love Paris to pieces. It is the repository of some of my fondest memories. The City of Light stirs the soul, stimulates the intellect, massages your eyes with its dazzling beauty and might improve your French – a language I fully intend to speak fluently before I die. But Paris won’t make my short list this year because of one and only one reason: the current exchange rate for the Euro which is approaching one and one half dollars. In March, I could have gotten a decent deal as you can see from the chart below. If I need to get my fix of French, I’ll do it in Montreal or Quebec City because the Loonie, the Canadian Dollar, now trades at 90 cents vs. parity during early 2008.
The days of the strong dollar are behind us. In the seventies, a buck went a long way abroad but its value has steadily eroded. Somewhere in my attic, I might still have a copy of “Europe on $5/day” or a later edition of the book which had a slightly modified title - “Europe on $15/day.” I wonder what the latest edition is titled - “How to finance a week in Paris with a second mortgage.” What an American in Paris needs most these days is a tin cup. But beggars have a right to be choosy. Put that tin cup away and go somewhere else where you don’t have to fret about the cost of a cup of coffee.
This year London seems like a saner choice. The Sterling Pound has taken a major hit and is now down 20% against the dollar. It’s the only major currency that has been bruised that badly against the dollar. Even the Mexican Peso and the Albanian Lek have made strides against the Greenback.
The currency market can be very volatile and can have unexpected results on your travel budget. I remember taking a three week trip around Mexico when the Peso was taking a major dive. It was incredible. I adjusted by exchanging just enough dollars to make it through the day. But there was an even better way to react – I took out my credit card whenever I could. By the time the bank processed the charges – the peso was even cheaper.
During the Asian Credit Crisis in 1998, I remember watching the New Zealand dollar (the Kiwi) take a six month plunge to below forty cents. Next door, the Australian dollar took a nose dive to where a US dollar was fetching two Aussies. In any case, that just happened to be the year of my life that I spent working in Wellington and getting paid in American dollars. When I settled in, I leased a furnished top floor waterfront apartment on Oriental Bay for 900 NZ dollars a month. At the time I signed the lease that was the equivalent of 600 American dollars. When I handed the keys back ten months later, the exchange rate had reduced my rent to under $400/month.
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