If you travel abroad from time to time, you are probably used to change money: to do so, you have to find a change office and accept the rates they offer. Many of them also ask to pay a fixed-amount fee, they want more money than what they get from the fx rate.... If it is a touristic place, there may be a little competition from different change offices, at least, if they don't agree prices. But in general, as an individual, you have very little power, you can't hardly negotitate, only accept what they propose... On the other side, if you choose to withdraw money from an ATM with your credit card, you will be paying the FX rate your bank decides to apply to you, with potentially other fees...

However, if Bitcoin become an accepted currency in shops worlwide, we could avoid to change money to the local currency. We will still need to change from OUR currency to Bitcoin, but I feel that we have a much larger negotiting power on that:
- you can do it anytime from your home
- you may automatically buy Bitcoin with a given limit at interesting rates, intead of accepting the prices proposed by a few change offices in the area
- you may have already created a Bitcoin wallet and be used to it: you will automatically understand if a price in a shop is cheap or expensive because you are used to see prices in bitcoins, instead of having to translate into your currency...
- you may keep the remaining money in Bitcoins and still be able to use it when you are back home, etc...

Bitcoin would work as a parallel universal currency, a situation that already exists with USD in many countries, where it is used in parallel with the local currency.

But of course, prior to that, it will need to become widely accepted and have a more stable price

What do you think? Have you ever used bitcoin when travelling abroad?