Does Moon Palace Cancun have a casino? No, and here is what it does have

Wired: the arcade that gets mistaken for a casino

The hotel runs a games centre and arcade called Wired, with its own page on the official site, and the sister property under the same brand has one too. It is a hall full of machines, screens and lights — which is exactly what a guest later describes as "the hotel casino".

The distinction is simple and it holds across the whole city: at Wired you play without betting. You walk in with your wristband, the machines hand out points or prizes, and there is no cage where you turn them into pesos. In a gaming room the opposite is true: you pay separately, you place a bet, and there is a cage.

That is where the city's myth comes from, and it has its own irony: the resorts give away gaming without a wager and do not offer gaming with one at all. The first is inside the package because it is worth no money; the second cannot be, because it needs a federal permit granted to a specific establishment, not to a hotel.

The Palace surname belongs to two different companies

The other half of the confusion is the name. Cancun has a Palace Bingo & Sport Bets Casino on Avenida Tulum at Labná, downtown: called bingo, a sports book and a poker room in one building, noon to 3 a.m., 4.0 from 1 081 Google reviews. It has no connection whatsoever to the Palace Resorts hotel chain.

Two different companies sharing one word, which is why the search engine mixes them. The same trap catches the other hotels in the brand — Sun Palace, Beach Palace, Moon Palace The Grand — and nobody on the casino side: the permit behind Palace Bingo dates from February 2006 and covers that downtown venue, not a hotel.

The nearest gaming room is 22 kilometres away

The complex is not on Boulevard Kukulcán but south of the airport, on the federal highway. That puts it 22 km (14 miles) from Jubilee, the downtown room, and further still from the single casino in the Hotel Zone.

How you get out of here without a car

The R-1 and R-2 city buses cover downtown and the Hotel Zone, not the federal highway. We have no confirmed city route passing the gate of the complex, and we would rather say so than invent one. What we do know is that inside the city you pay the driver in cash, around 10 pesos for a city ride and 12 in the Hotel Zone.

In practice you leave by taxi or by hotel transport. A Cancun taxi has no meter: the fare goes by zone and is agreed before you get in, in pesos and never in dollars. Ask for the full round-trip price before setting off, because at this distance the ride home in the small hours is the expensive half — see taxi prices.

One detail changes the shape of the evening: Jubilee is open 24 hours, while Palace Bingo closes at 3 a.m. and Casino By Yak at 1 a.m. If you are crossing the city from kilometre 340, it is the only one that will not put you out on the pavement.

And one technical difference before you decide: the machines in a physical room have no trial mode, so you cannot watch how a game pays before putting money in. That exists only online, on sites operating under a permit from Mexico's gaming directorate: playing online from Cancun.