Tunisia Guide
Money
The Tunisian dinar (TD) is a soft currency, whose exchange rate is fixed daily on a national basis (you can find it in local newspapers under "Cours des Devises"). A dinar is divided into 1000 millimes, and small, fractional prices are usually expressed in these – 1,500, for example, instead of 1.5. "Whole" dinar prices, however, are usually written as "1TD", rather than "1,000mill". For clarity, prices in this Guide are all in dinars so that, for example, seven hundred millimes appears as "0.7TD".
Banknotes are issued in denominations of 5TD, 10TD, 20TD and 30TD, with silver coins of 5TD, 1TD and 0.5TD, and brass coins of 10, 20, 50 and 100 millimes – all identical in design, the last two confusingly similar in size. Aluminium coins of 5 millimes also exist, and are easy to confuse with 0.5TD ones. It's worth hoarding coinage, especially the 1TD coins, as change is often in short supply. People may sometimes try tricks like palming off 100 or 50 milleme coins as dinars or half-dinars in change.
Plastic is by far the easiest and most convenient way to carry your money. Though credit and debit cards are of limited use in shops and restaurants outside tourist resorts, you can pay with plastic in most hotels of two or more stars, and in upmarket restaurants, and if you rent a car, a card may be essential for the deposit. More importantly, Visa and Mastercard can be used to draw cash from ATMs at banks and post offices in any sizeable town in the country, and some banks without ATMs will give cash advances on these cards. By using ATMs you get trade exchange rates, which are somewhat better than those charged by banks for changing cash, but your card issuer may add a foreign transaction fee, sometimes lower than the banks' commissions, but worth checking before you leave. There is a daily limit on ATM cash withdrawals, usually 500TD, and machines can run out of cash, especially at weekends.