Foreign travel is becoming an increasingly expensive thing for American tourists and the dollar is showing no signs of appreciating in the near future. For the sake of example consider this – five years ago, a hotel room priced at $200 Canadian cost $126 when it took just 63 U.S. cents to buy one Canadian dollar. Now the same room costs $200 U.S., a 60 percent increase.
If the room was 200 euros, the cost in American dollars was $210 at an exchange rate of $1.05 to one euro; now, with the rate at $1.47, it’s $294, up 40 percent.
A neat article here by Carol Pucci lays down some useful and common sense thumb rules for travelers.