I’d recommend somewhere downtown. I’ve never stayed downtown but you can use Orbitz or any hotel search engine (or tripadvisor to see what people think of the hotels) to find a hotel in the city center rather than the hotel zone. The central bus station is downtown also.

Also you can take a bus to downtown rather than get raped on taxi fare: http://www.mapchick.com/to_hotel.html Just be sure to start out with some pesos, I don’t think they take US dollars. There is an ATM when you arrive in the airport, that is how I always get my pesos (usually better rates than the money exchange places).

Have fun!

Try El Rey de Caribe. I haven’t stayed there myself, but when I walked by it looked like a very nice, inexpensive place to stay.

http://www.reycaribe.com/

We stayed at El Pueblito. It was cheap, clean, and the people were nice. It’s on the beach and it was next to the Hilton, I think. Between the airport and downtown Cancun we were the first ones dropped off. Hope that helps. Have fun! :-)