How to exchange money in Venezuela in the current hyperinflation scenario is not one of the easiest tasks of a traveller. I was in Venezuela for 20 days in the month of August 2017 and there were no tourists travelling there, regarding the safety issues. The official rate if you go to an exchange shop or whitdrawal money in the ATM was 2.700 bolivars for 1 USD. On the other hand the parallel exchange rate that is updated daily in the website DOLLAR TODAY fluctuated between 7.000 and 20.000 bolivars for 1 USD in this period. Above I explained a few challenges I faced while changing money there.
The only things that matter are US Dollars CASH
If you try the legal ways of getting money in Venezuela you are going to be ripped off by the government official rates. The solution for you is entering the country with US dollars cash (hide them pretty well not to be stolen by police in the road checks – my buses were stoped about 20 times when I was there). Venezuelans are looking for US dollars as an investment and as a way to scape the country in case they move out.
There are no bills in the street
The first big challenge is the fact that there are no bills on the market. The ATMs were allowing maximum whitdrawal of 8.000 bolivars a day and 30.000 inside the bank (around 2 USD). Finding someone with cash is hard (only business owners have cash). In the picture above I am holding 1 USD in 100 bills.
Bills in the street has low denomination value
The second challenge is finding the bills with a high denomination value such as 1.000, 5.000, 10.000, 20.000 launched in February 2017 into the market. Most of the people are still paying things with a huge amount of bills of 50 or 100. In the picture above I have 10.000 bolivars in 50 bills, equal to 1 USD when I exchanged. I found people to change using my network of friends from couchsurfing. It is not a great idea to exchange with people you don’t really trust considering this transaction is illegal.
Getting a local bank card from someone trustful is a good idea
An alternative solution I made to help me with the problem of cash was getting a card from a Bank in Venezuela, trough a friend contact. This guy gave me his bank card with 700.000 bolivars and I gave him 100 USD cash. You should only do that if you are sure the person is trustful. This helped me not to carry tons of bills around and to be able to buy things no matter the value in an easy way.