Travel money...

The big question is how much to take and in what form? Gone are the days you would take a couple of hundred dollars in cash and a larger sum in travellers cheques.  On our last trip we got rid of the last of our travellers cheques from previous trips and the server was not sure if they could take them.

The last couple of visits we have taken some cash and used a pre-paid travel card.  The card has been great and we pay for most things using it.  It comes with an app that allows you to keep track of your spending.  In most cases using the travel money card, you don't even need to sign for purchases.  This I find a little worrying as if it were to be lost or stolen it could be easily used with no real checks.  The card does come with a pin, but this has never worked on any card reader in a shop in the USA.   The card can be topped up and on-line or in the travel agents shop.  The exchange rate is the standard tourist exchange rate, which at the moment is not great.

This year, however, we now have a credit card which is designed to be used abroad.  There is no exchange commission fee or "we buy, we sell" rates. (On a trip to China, I exchanged £300 to Chinnese RMB at a local exchange and upon returning exchanged the remaining cash back to pounds Stirling.  As the trip was a business trip I worked out how much this had cost for calculating expenses.  It turned out to be £27!).  The other advantages of using the credit card are that the exchange rate used is that which the banks use which is better than the tourist rate.  Once again the card comes with an app that allow us to track our spending.

As we will be using a credit card, we can link this to our Magicbands and have all Disney purchases charged to our room.  This will be handy as we can just go out with a small amount of cash and not have to worry about having the credit/travel cards being lost or stolen. This will also be handy for visits to the water parks.

It will be interesting to see how this works out, but it does kind of remove the "How much do I take?" question.  We will just get some dollars in cash for small items and tips.  The question now becomes "Can we keep our spending to our pre-defined limit?". This may not be that easy given all the temptations at Disney World!