paying hotels with cash

I suggest that you ask the hotel if it will accept a bank draft in British pounds. If they will, then open an account with XE Trade, www.xe.com/fx. Money will be taken from your checking account by electronic transfer and a bank draft in pounds will be made payable to the hotel. Have the draft mailed to your home address rather than to the hotel. Take it with you and give it to the hotel when you arrive. The exchange rate is only slightly higher than the international rate on the date the transaction is initiated and there are no fees.

That is one big hotel bill. At current exchange rates, that is $1400. Depending on your ATM limit, you might try maxing out your daily limit on two ATM accounts for a couple of days. My credit union allows $1000 withdraw perday so I could do it in two days.

The twenty-five or thirty bucks for the ftf for putting it on a credit card might be worth it just to avoid the pain in the neck.

You may want to use Travelers Checks (I realize this is a thing of the past). However, in Italy last year we were at a RS property that only accepted cash. We had been warned in advance that the ATM machine in town did not always have funds available. We purchased Euro Travelers Checks here in the US for the sole purpose of paying this hotel bill. You may be able to get British Pound Travelers Checks. Check with your bank. We used the American Express Travel office.

It is difficult to get that much cash out of an atm. You may need to use multiple atms, multiple accounts and more than one person w/d from diff accounts.

You might want to see if you can break the transaction in two and pay half at the beginning and half half-way through- then you only need to come up with 450 initially. Wait, did they say when you needed to pay? Different places have different rules. I used two diff checking accounts and pulled the max from each on alternate days, but when I had a large payment due, I pulled the max from both on the same day.

If you are wiorried about travelling around in London with a large amount of cash, prepay most of it when you first arrive in cash and then the balance when you leave. I have also paid with whatever cash/travellers checks I have left and the balance with a credit card