While in Argentina, I learned a sound lesson that I will take with me on every trip from now on. That lesson was, have local currency on you or at least have a debit card you know will work. As an operations coordinator, I plan until I’m blue in the face. My plan was to get currency from the Travelex counter (I’ll pay the extra exchange fees for convenience of having the money!) in Houston during our layover. What I didn’t plan on was our flight being delayed to the point we’d have 9 minutes to connect to our flight. Thankfully, the flight waited for us as there were 30 others on the flight trying to get to Buenos Aires. I had assumed I would have time to get the cash I needed, but that left me high and dry. I had also decided to leave my debit card at home, which meant I was left only with my credit card to get me by and some US cash.
Luckily, my lovely and intelligent travel partner had the smarts to bring along her debit card, which I had to use along the way. We found out quickly that each ATM has a daily limit and it’s not much. Her card didn’t work the first few days and her husband had to call their bank multiple times in order for it to accept the charge. Poor Molly, poor planning on my part. Another issue we ran into is that you could only get ARS from exchange booths if you had large bills in USD. Of course, yet again, I failed to bring something I needed – enough cash. All in all…lesson learned.
