Cash, credit or Travellers checks?

[wdwnewfnut]

What do people take with them to disney. If cash, do you carry it with you everyday or trust the room safe? Do you trust the safe with passport or take that with you as well. If you can't tell, I'm a paranoid traveller and haven't travelled in a long time. Any advise would be great!!

Thanks

 

[tiggerrr]

What do people take with them to disney. If cash, do you carry it with you everyday or trust the room safe? Do you trust the safe with passport or take that with you as well. If you can't tell, I'm a paranoid traveller and haven't travelled in a long time. Any advise would be great!!

Thanks

We use all three to varying degrees, depending on the length of trip and where we are staying. If we are staying on property and not doing much except Disney, I leave a credit card on file at the hotel and we use the room keys for charging privileges.

Disney is also really good at cashing travellers checks just about everywhere, except some of the smaller kiosks so you shouldn't have a problem using TC.

If we are going to be doing things off property, I carry more cash. Outside disney there are a lot of places that won't take travellers checks. I prefer cash to credit cards most of the time. Orlando has a higher rate of credit card fraud than most places, so I avoid using credit cards at restaurants and gas stations in particular. The only place I use credit cards regularly is when we shop at the outlet malls. We buy too much to use cash. I just watch my credit card transactions online to make sure nothing happens.

This last trip, four of us went for 10 days with a total of $400 in TC and $600 in cash and we came back with $300 cash and no TC. A lot got charged the room (so maybe that is a case for more cash - because it is really easy to just pull out the room key).

I am personally a big fan of prepaying whatever I can to avoid using cash or credit. I buy all my tickets and packages ahead of time.

As for the safe, I have never personally had any hesitation about using and in-room safe. We leave our passports, cash, travellers checks, some credit cards, cell phones and cameras in there. Some of the safes are big enough for the laptop as well. My belief is that most in room thefts are more crimes of opportunity. People will grab whatever is laying around, I don't think they are as likely to try to break into a safe.

 

[wdwnewfnut]

Thank you very much!!

 

[F4disneyfan]

We take a small ammt of cash maybe 200 for food and gas on the drive down the rest is TC's for all other purchases and around the parks etc.

 

[digskat]

We take a small ammt of cash maybe 200 for food and gas on the drive down the rest is TC's for all other purchases and around the parks etc.

Do you have any trouble using the Travellers Cheques anywhere? Thanks Kat

 

[MECH8T7]

I try to take about half of my spending money (e.g. food and incidental expenses) in travellers cheques. The way I look at it is that, if my wallet was lost or stolen, the travellers cheques might be the easiest to replace in the short term, assuming that I still at least have my passport. (I've never lost any credit cards before and don't know how easy they would be to replace if you are on vacation out of the country.)

I always use the room safe to store our passports and any cash / travellers cheques in excess of what I am comfortable carrying around.

(I always make sure that I've stored the receipt for the travellers cheques in one of our pieces of luggage and NOT with the travellers cheques or in my wallet....and record the serial numbers and denominations of the travellers cheques as I use them to make it easier to identify which ones and how much was lost or stolen.)

 

[F4disneyfan]

Do you have any trouble using the Travellers Cheques anywhere? Thanks Kat

The only place we ever had any issues was out near cocoa beach at a gas station but never have we had any issues in and around Disney at any resort park or shop even the outlet shops gladly take TC's and the time we had the issue was back in 2003. The problem they had was the clerk had no clue what it was LOL.

 

[joech]

We always leave our passport in the safe. I am more worry of losing the key for the safe than anything else.

I always use my credit card for any purchase (except food, we use DDP) at WDW. I figure why not take advantage of the added insurance my credit card offer in case any thing happen to my purchased. During our last trip, the CM shipped my purchase to a different resort and I ended up driving to PORS to get my purchase.

 

[disneyfreak89]

In the past we mostly used Travellers Cheques because of the wide exceptance at Disney PLUS your resort will CASH them out for you for up to $200 a day (that may have changed).

Having charging privileges on the resort card worked well too, since all our purchases were tallied up at the end of our trip and only one "charge" was put on our card instead of 'several' charges throughout our stay = easy to keep track of.

I agree, having cash for OUTSIDE the world is your best bet....less chance of fraud.

 

[davidsprincess]

We use cash only and keep the card for emergencies. In the last hotel we stayed in there was no in-room safe and I just hid our passports really good. So good in fact that when I was packing up the night before we left I couldn't find where I had hid my passport!

This trip it will be in the safe!

 

[tribus121]

I Would trust the safe in the room

i would never carry very much cash to the parks we only carried less than $50 cash ( for the 4 of us )and no credit cards ( every thing else including most of our ID was left in the room safe ).We used our room card for all most every thing that we bought ad payed it off daily so that we kept track of how much we actually spent ( only works if staying onsite )

I don't really like Travelers checks i find them really inconvenient

one tip for carrying cash is to carry more than one wallet one with just a small amount of cash that you use to pay for things ( so that the person standing behind you in line does not know how much you are carrying )and an other that has everything else i it ( that you keep hidden and don't take out in public )