Traveller's cheque
form of cheque in various fixed denominations (10, 20, 50, 100 etc.) of a certain currency, which can be bought at financial institutions and be cashed worldwide, while it is fully insured against loss or theft
A traveller's cheque is a medium of exchange that can be used in place of the currency of a country. Each cheque is denominated in a preprinted fixed, round, amount of one of a number of major world currencies; it has two panels for a signature. The purchaser signs one panel of each cheque on receiving it; to use it, it is signed on the second panel and dated in the presence of the payee, who accepts it if the signatures match. It can then be deposited into a bank account in the same way as a normal cheque; payment was guaranteed if the signatures matched, even if a cheque had been used fraudulently, for example stolen, encouraging merchants to accept them routinely. While it was possible for the issuer to go out of business, invalidating cheques, most issuers were large, stable businesses.
Traveller's cheques were widely used from the 1850s to the 1990s by people travelling in foreign countries instead of cash, mainly before the introduction of payment cards and later electronic methods of payment. They were much safer for the traveller as their value would be reimbursed if stolen, unlike cash. A book of cheques of different amounts would be carried, to be cashed or spent as required. They could be exchanged for local currency at a bank, and many merchants accepted them as payment.
The financial institutions issuing traveller's cheques earn income in a number of ways.
The public source identifies “Traveller's cheque” as form of cheque in various fixed denominations (10, 20, 50, 100 etc.) of a certain currency, which can be bought at financial institutions and be cashed worldwide, while it is fully insured against loss or theft. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Traveller's, cheque and form.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1061429. The Library of Congress control number is sh85137174. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “Traveller's cheque” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.