Cancun: Water? Electricity? Money? etc?

Factual Questions
1

I’m going to Cancun on vacation. Three quick questions:

Can we drink the water?

Do we need adapters for electrical devices, like laptops?

Should we take dollars, travelers checks or just use credit cards?

Any other tips are welcome too.

2
  1. In the hotel, most likely.
  2. Nope. You’re coming from the USA or Canada, right? If so, then I stand by “nope.”
  3. US dollars? No problem. Do they still make travelers checks? Credit cards are perfect, unless you want to leave the enclave and get into town.
3

By Cancun I assume you mean you’re heading to the Hotel Zone. I was there last year and to follow Balthisar’s comments:

3.) Don’t take traveler’s cheques, IMHO those are the BIGGEST waste of money I have ever experienced. You’ll pay a premium to buy them, then a premium to cash them, spend all your time looking for a place that will cash them, and in the end get a horrible exchange rate.

Take your credit cards, some US cash, and some pesos. Its nearl-universally accepted that $10 US is $1pesos so they convert very easily, and from what I can remember nearly everyone accepted US currency, even extremely remote taco stands.

When you get to your hotel, find where a bank machine is, and then use that when you need cash.

4

Bottled water is everywhere.

Use the ATM machines for pesos, take some US cash.

Electrical is the same.

Relax and enjoy your trip.

5

Well, the benefit to traveller’s checks is the whole “you can replace them if they’re stolen” thing, not the convenience. And the premium is very low – a few dollars. But they’re not really needed, everyone takes US dollars and credit cards. Note that you will get modestly reamed if you don’t convert to Pesos as the current exchange rate is closer to 11:1, but everyone uses 10:1. So you take an 6-10% hit if you use US dollars.

Most of the restaurants/venders advertised that their water is purified. And it likely is, but you can stick with bottled water if you want to be sure.

6

I went to non-Hotel Zone Cancun last year;

It was really interesting, but I did avoid the water. Just didn’t want to take a chance on getting sick. (It caught up with me in Merida anyway :frowning: ).

You won’t need an electrical adapter.

You’ll probably want to use pesos for the reasons Finagle and emacknight mentioned, but when I ran out of pesos on my last day, everyone was still very happy to accept dollars.