It’s Easier Than Ever to Travel Abroad Without Cash

On a recent trip to England, Andrew Dodson, 35, and his wife, Erin, 32, who live in Traverse City, Mich., had an unexpected problem: No matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t spend the 700 British pounds they’d brought along.

“We traveled all around the country, including many small towns in the Lake District and the Cotswolds, and even the tiniest of pubs took cards,” said Mr. Dodson, a content marketing manager for TentCraft, a manufacturer of customized tents and accessories. “Many wouldn’t even accept cash. As we approached the end of our trip, we went to a nice dinner at this Indian restaurant where we hoped to spend off some of the cash we converted, only to be told they don’t accept cash anymore.”

Finally, their London hotel let them pay their balance with cash so they wouldn’t have to bring the pounds home and reconvert them to dollars.

For American vacationers, traveling overseas used to involve the ritual of obtaining local currency, whether from a bank at home before heading off, or from an A.T.M. or currency exchange at their destination. But in a transition hastened by the pandemic’s preference for contactless payment, increasingly you can travel abroad and barely ever handle a physical bill or coin, whether pounds, kroner or euros.

“I’ve had the same 10 euro in my purse for weeks,” said Julene English, 62, a Fairfax, Calif., retiree on her first international trip since the pandemic, a three-month sojourn with her husband in Italy, France and Britain.

Consumers and the travel industry are both playing a part in the trend toward cashless trips. Travel suppliers and service providers have “adopted technology to facilitate online transactions and payments,” while consumers have become “more familiar and comfortable with contactless payments,” said Charuta Fadnis, a senior vice president for research and product strategy at the travel industry research firm Phocuswright. “Paying with a tap of their cards or phones is a behavior that is expected to persist.”

Of course, the move to cashless travel didn’t start with the pandemic. The increased use of digital payment options and mobile wallets is a long-term trend that’s been going on for the last 10 years in Asia and the last three years everywhere else, said Michael Orlando, the chief operating officer of the global payments company Yapstone.

“But there’s no question that the pandemic helped shift that trend into high gear,” said Matt Schulz, the…