Cashless in the Cinque Terre

I have a habit of not carrying cash.  For our first overseas trip last year, we made it through two weeks with zero euros in Paris, Nice, and Madrid.  There were only a few times when it would have come in handy for little trinkets in Ezé, but we managed just fine.  And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I enjoy points, so I always use a card if I can. And I'm lazy, so there's that.

I booked the Hotel La Zorza in Riomaggiore, Italy, in October 2023. I had pieced this trip together to celebrate our first anniversary only a month prior.

This left me with little choice of dates and room types for most of the points hotels for the trip.  But there are no points hotels in the Cinque Terre that I know of or could find. Not wanting to forfeit any point-earning opportunities, I booked the Bar/Hotel Zorza through the Capital One Travel Portal.  I have the Venture X card, which gives me 10x on hotels booked through their portal.  Not ideal, but I considered this a solid alternative.  And the hotel, bar, whatever, was right out of central casting, as were most of my accommodations this trip.  It was less than 5 minutes from the train station, hundreds of years old, and not on top of an ungodly hill.  The window opened onto the main thoroughfare, excellent for late night people-watching. Riomaggiore is the biggest town in the Cinque Terre, with a parade of Aperol-fueled travelers trekking up said ungodly hill from the station to their rooms. 

Apparently, every hotel in Riomaggiore charges a €2 person fee per night, payable only in cash. Or I was being lied to. Either way, had I done more research, I’d have known this, but the fee was not disclosed in Capital One's booking process.

I did not have a debit card. The two credit cards I had were the Venture (Not Venture X; I don’t like carrying metal cards on me if I can help it) and the Chase Sapphire Preferred. The Venture serves the same purpose for general spending as the Venture X in a much lighter package. In fact, I can’t remember the last time that card was swiped in North America. 

The bartender, who checked me in and showed me to the room, said I could pay later.  I then did some quick Googling and found I could use a credit card at an ATM for a cash advance.  I’d never done this before, and the fees are criminal if you carry even a daily balance, so I needed to pay the balance right away.  So far, it was okay.  I’m going to pay some ATM fees, but live and learn. And it's only €4, so i wasn't sweating it...yet.

Except, I could not find an ATM that would accept those cards anywhere in the Cinque Terre. I have no idea why. According to websites and customer service reps, there shouldn’t have been a problem, but there was. Over the next two days, I went to every ATM that Google and Apple Maps would give me, but no luck. I even took the train to La Speiza to try my luck there, with the same result. I did sit down for a beer while I was there, though, so it was totally a lost cause.

Beer:Thirty

La Speiza

If it came down to it, my nuclear option is a tactic some would just have started with: ask someone for the damn €4 and Zelle or Venmo or Apple Pay them the money. But for myriad reasons that only a psychologist can provide, this terrifies me, and I must figure it out on my own.

Eighteen hours before leaving for Florence, the up-to-then-tidy street around the Hotel Zorza was suddenly littered with little white paper. Receipts.  ATM receipts.  There was an unmapped ATM right there.  I inserted the Venture card.  AND THE FCKR WORKED.  No idea why or how it worked.  I have no idea why it wasn’t on Google or any maps.  I have no idea why I hadn’t seen it before.  I walked by it dozens of times.  

I’m sure there’s some deeper lesson here about personal blinders, overreliance on technology, and the importance of really absorbing your environment and experience. I’ll eventually figure it out, but in the meantime, I’ll try to have some local currency on me.