Where is the best place to exchange US dollars for Namibian $$ ?

Do you get good exchange rate ate the airport?

It is likely a universal truth that you will NEVER get a good exchange rate at ANY airport.
Try your local bank and see if they can get Som N$ but only order the bare minimum....just enough to get you to someplace in Namibia that will give you a fair rate.

Offer to buy some on our Classifieds forum. Someone may have a few Namibian dollars left over from a recent visit.

George

Unless things have very recently changed, the South African Rand (ZAR) is accepted almost universally in Namibia on par with the Namibian Dollar. The ZAR may be easier to find and will serve you as well. You'll almost always do best at an ATM machine, but check out the exchange provisions of your card company first.

At least according to the locals, and contrary to almost anywhere else in the world, the best exchange rate (not counting ATMs which I'm not familiar with) in Namibia was at the Windhoek airport. This was true when we arrived and left 3 weeks later last summer. I checked several different locations and banks while we were touring and they all had poorer exch. rates than at the airport. The Rand is widely accepted in smaller denominations. We were told that larger Rand bills might create problems, especially out in the countryside, due to counterfeiting concerns. Since we had mostly N$ that wasn't a real concern to us, so am not sure how accurate it might be.

quote:

You'll almost always do best at an ATM machine,

Yeah, that's almost a universal truth. Never been to Namibia before, but in another hundred-odd countries, I've rarely gotten better rates, with the glaring exception of Angola, where you went to the fly market (no self-respecting flea would have been caught dead there), and bought it on the (black) market rate.

Hotels are usually the worst, many airports give pretty good rates, but the ATM is a good bet.

Your credit card company will also pay bills at the best rate and not inflated..

Mike

quote:

Originally posted by retreever:
Your credit card company will also pay bills at the best rate and not inflated..

Mike

Mike:

True, but necessarily at the best final cost to the user, some credit card companies are now adding a "transaction" fee per charge as well as other extraneous fees which puts them at or above local costs, even factoring in exchange rates, ESPECIALLY if they are locked into some kind of artificial exchange rate.

In addition, as I'm sure you know, there are a couple of other potential problems with credit card use in Africa, especially South Africa. One, you should inform your CC company when and where you intend to go to help prevent fraud and to allow you to make that larger than normal charge for that stuffed teddy bear (just kidding) in Gaboon.....
Second, and this is a real and serious problem, credit card number theft and usage in Africa is EXTREMELY common and I would recommend using them only in the "best" of places and guardedly ever there. You can charge something at one of the "park" hotels, just for example, and find that before you've eaten lunch your card is being used 3 countries away to buy tires.

I've never really needed that many 'Banana Dollars" as they are reffered to there, and have always done better using the credit card at the few hotels I've stayed in. Most farmers (jagdfarmers) want the euro anyway to stash into their euro German and Austrian accounts. The place I go to, gives me a one to one euro / USD exchange rate anyway.

I've actually found it hard to spend much money in windhoek, because I refuse to patronize any business that is on a street named after a communist b*stard, and out of principle do not even drive on Fidel Castro, Robert Mugabe or Karl Marx blvd. Sometimes I like to walk out to Robert Mugabe street and piss on the signpost.

Then they went and changed the names in Swakopmund, which makes it hard to go there now too.