BootsnAll Travel Community

If you were an American that travelled to Cuba, how did you book/reserve your hotel without using your american credit card?

Well...you just don't use a credit card. There are many nice "casa particulares" online that you can reserve without a credit card, and you get to stay with real Cubans. We never stayed in a hotel..but I'd guess there might be some hotels that will just take a reservation without a card number. However! We must say that EVERY casa particular (4 different locations,too) that we reserved was never the one we ended up at in the end. We'd roll into town, find our place, and then they'd tell us that there was some mix up and they were full. They just took us to their friend's place and it always worked out fine in the end, but we were a little annoyed sometimes since we planned to stay at particular places that we confirmed online in order to save time. Oh well. We guessed that this might be common practice (overbooking)...in order to be sure they have customers.

So...don't worry about not finding a nice place, it just might not be the place you were planning on. We're not sure using a credit card would make a difference either. Maybe in the ritzier hotels. Es Cuba...