Bucuti, Aruba - food/drink budget

mrslauralyons

We're thinking about going staying at Bucuti in Aruba, but are a little nervious about a non-all-inclusive.  Anyone have a guess how much they did/are budgeting for food and drinks for a week's trip in Aruba?

maddie7

We stayed at the RIU for this reason. I can tell you a Coor Lite across the street was $12! I would say plan $100 for dinners and more if you drink.

emilyinchile

We stayed at the Bucuti. We spent about $120 at the grocery store on our first day to get sandwich and snack stuff (for days we were just at the hotel but didn't want to have a sit-down lunch at the hotel restaurant), a bunch of beers and some rum. That worked well for us and I'm sure helped cut down on what we spent on beach days.

I found prices at most restaurants to be pretty similar to the SF Bay Area, where I'm originally from. Dinner main courses at several places we went were $25-35. Mixed drinks were in the $10 range. Prices at the hotel, if I remember correctly from the couple lunches we did have there, were similar to that. Obviously your budget for the week will depend on whether you get appetizers and dessert at every meal and how much you drink. It's not cheap, but it wasn't as ruinously expensive as some people had made it sound.

LADY324

thanks for asking this question we are thinking about staying here for 3 nights for our honeymoon and then going to the Renassiance for 6 nights. 

meduzax

well it all depends if you guys want to have a casual drink here and there, or if you want to "drink".  I was just there and I absolutely love Bucuti!  for 6 days that we where there we have spent about $300 on drinks, and some room charges at the store (SPF, some beer for the room, etc.)  We have spent a lot of money for Dinners - but we went to Passions on the beach, Screaming Eagle, Flying fishbone - all of them where awesome and the food was really really good!  What's great about Bucuti you have breakfast included. All the prices were not scary to us because we live in NY and we are used to paying about $12 per cocktail.

[Deleted User]

Thank you so much for asking this!!! We were worried about the same thing, but FI lives in NY so we are used to expensive, good to know that it is comparable. Thanks for the tip about the grocery store. I love the knot!