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Topics: Martin Lewis, Money, Travel, Cost of Living
Claire Reid
Sometimes it pays to take good advice, and when the advice is coming from Mr Money Saving Expert himself Martin Lewis it certainly does - so much so that one bloke using one of his holiday tips managed to save a whopping £1,000.
Lewis shared his top holiday money saving tricks on his podcast last week, and the tips have already been paying off for his listeners.
Among the advice doled out by Lewis was a simple check to see if the price of your hotel room has gone down since booking.
If it has, then it’s time to check the small print of your booking and if you have free cancellation in place, you can simply cancel the old booking and make a new one for the lower price. Clever, eh?
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And one listener called Andrew has revealed the little known hack saved him a grand.
In an email, Andrew said: "I followed your advice, checked our hotel price. I cancelled and rebooked saving over £1,000. Thanks for all your help." Nicely done.
The Money Saving Expert warned that before trying to rebook, you carefully check if you are entitled to free cancellations, or else any savings you might make could be wiped out by cancellation fees.
Lewis has previously warned Brits about accepting currency conversion on cash machines abroad.
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If you’re out and about overseas and realise you’re a little light on cash, you may think heading to an ATM is a good idea - but it's important not to fall foul of extra charges that could whittle down your bank balance.
The first thing he recommends you check is whether there's a fee to make a withdrawal from a cash machine, as one of the ATMs he tried in his experiment wanted to charge him €7 (£6) to take out money.
Next, he warned that on top of the exchange rate involved with converting currency, many cash machines charge a mark-up fee to scoop out a little bit of extra dough from the transaction.
He said: "It says there is a mark-up fee of 4.5 percent, so they are adding a 4.5 percent load on top of the exchange rate.
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"You do not want this machine to do the conversion for you. I want your card company at home to do the conversion.
"You want your card company at home to do the conversion because, even if it's not a good card, it's a better rate.
"Continue with conversion? No way, it's going to cost me 20 quid more than it should."