You could consider replacing your 28 Degrees with the
Bankwest Zero Platinum MasterCard, which similarly has no annual fee and no foreign transaction fees on online or overseas purchases.
But it also includes complimentary travel insurance (you'd need to check if the policy suits your requirements), and has none of the 28D's payment shenanigans (i.e. fee to pay via BPay and issues with the online payment portal).
Thanks for that suggestion - probably one of the better suggestions and not just a defeatist 'suck it up' attitude. Some of the other posters are correct in that it would be difficult (but not impossible) to put together a list of Flight Booking Sites that appear to charge in AUD (because they have foreign merchant banks people get 'ambushed' by the Forex fees), two main variables are the card/bank that the customer uses and the flight booking site name and location.
I would think that rather than one person going through every agregator and buying airfares and finding out 'the hard way' - it would be possible to put together a matrix and let contributors on the site populate the data as they book fares on different sites with different cards over time, understand that flight booking sites may change their merchants without notification but at least this way the changes would be picked up fairly quickly. Pretty time consuming to summarize and validate in a matrix but maybe could be looked at by AFF as some sort of value add? Or let a thread run as a sticky over time and then could be summarized and even put in members only? Is this something that people are prepared to pay for?
Seems there is a demand for a "Which flight booking sites disclose/don't disclose their sneaky overseas merchant facilities and enable the Forex fee on credit cards" and a demand for "I want a decent credit card that I can use on overseas web sites without getting whacked by secretive forex fees"
Two different approaches from the flight booking web site end and the customers credit card end.
I have Cba black.
Reasonable free travel insurance ( read PDFs and queried a few things then decided it suited my needs).
Need to activate for best insurance coverage. Again very easy to do.
No travel spend on card required.
I have blocked international transactions on this card (simple to do on site or app).
I have booked through Expedia.com.au. Takes a little time to process as they tried to charge from overseas but this was rejected due to my settings mentioned above. Payment then processed as Australian transaction with no intervention by me.
That was an imaginative solution to the problem - in that case expedia are in the position where they have to accept credit cards and honour the bookings made, but because of the foreign merchant forex shennanigans they then presumably had to run the transaction through an australian merchant bank? Obviously not a solution for everyone, especially if you did want to use the card overseas but a legitimate solution nevertheless....
Short of regulatory intervention, the idea of many customers coming together and sharing information seems a viable method to 'defeat' these undisclosed overseas merchant/forex fee transactions that banks seem to love so much.
Customers sharing information also helps competative tension between the flight booking sites, and provides competative tension between different australian credit card issuers and discourages cartel-like behavior.
