We had a similar situation when transfering money to make a payment in the UK and queried why we had been charged. Apparently there are different sorts of transfers, BACS I believe is free but others are chargeable.

Pam

A cheaper way to transfer money is to send it via PayPal. This is free for the sender while the receiver of the money pays a couple of percent commission.

I have paypal but how would you do that sending sterling to euro ?
or does it do it automatically

You can specify which currency you want to pay in , and that gets taken off your credit-card are the current rate of exchange. It's just like buying something from (say) the USA where the price is stated in dollars. Your credit card company will to all the exchange fiddly bits for you.

But you can only use Paypal if the recipient of the money has also set-up a Paypal account. Sounds like the recipient is wanting this deposit paid into a personal account rather than a business account and that will always cost you more. Is this a private let as opposed to being done through a letting agency? The latter usually have systems set-up for easy electronic transfer either through credit cards or the BACS system.

SM

This is always a problem with booking privately and especially when the owner lives abroad and has no UK bank account.

When booking privately (which we nearly always do now) we tend to avoid those apartments/villas which are priced in euros as most of the time they involve paying into a foreign bank account which will cost you extra.

Pippa

I had this problem when booking an apartment in Ljubljana for April of this year. The owner wanted a €100 deposit but didn't have a PayPal or credit-card account .I even offered to post him a €100 note in the post , but in the end he accepted my booking without the deposit and I paid the full amount when we got there.

We are off to Valencia next month and luckily the owner of that apartment has a UK bank account.

but in the end he accepted my booking without the deposit and I paid the full amount when we got there.

This is what we have always been able to arrange with regards to an apartment we regularly rent in the Canaries - once we've arrived I pop in to see the owners agent and pay in cash in Euros. It means that neither of us are paying any commission but it does require a leap of faith on the part of the owner in the first instance.

SM