Any website that prints today’s lira rate is publishing tomorrow’s wrong answer — the currency is famously mobile, and your banking app already knows the truth. So this page skips the number and teaches the system: how paying for things actually works between the airport and the ancient marble.
Cards first, cash second
Türkiye is heavily carded: contactless Visa and Mastercard work in supermarkets, restaurants, museums, fuel stations and most shops down to surprisingly small ones. Pay in lira when the terminal offers a currency choice — “dynamic conversion” into your home currency is a politely packaged bad rate, everywhere on earth. Keep cash lira for the honourable holdouts: dolmuş minibuses, market stalls, public toilets (small coins), village cafés, and tips.
Euros, dollars and the rounding game
Tourist businesses along this coast often accept euros or dollars — usefully in a pinch, but at self-serving round numbers; paying foreign cash is a convenience fee you did not need. Exchange offices (döviz) in towns beat airport counters comfortably; ATMs are ubiquitous and fine, subject to your bank’s fees — decline the ATM’s own conversion offer too, same principle. The classic mistake of the older guidebooks — arriving with wads of pre-exchanged cash — is now simply unnecessary.
Tipping, calibrated
Restaurants: 5–10% in cash for table service, appreciated rather than enforced. Taxis: round up. Hotel staff: small notes for bags and housekeeping. Hamam attendants: 10–15% of the service. Guides and drivers: at your judgement for a day well made — never demanded, always noticed. Tipping here is a warm custom, not an American-style obligation, and nobody performs arithmetic at the table.
