There’s no doubt that a working cell phone is one of your most valuable tools on the road. It will help you navigate while driving, walking or looking for public transit. It’ll give you talking travel guides, free calls back home and all the other zillion things you use your Smartphone for.

So it’s VITAL that you have enough data at your fingertips. You already know that carriers charge egregious, outlandish rates for international roaming, and there’s no way you want to be stuck with that bill.

Our solution? Keep one phone with your regular phone number on and available to receive calls and texts from home (in our case, Elaine’s, since I’m the techy one.) Then, as soon as you land, buy a local SIM card at the airport and get lots of data so you always have Googlemaps and everything else at your fingertips.

It will usually cost $25-$40 for about 3 gigs of data, which should be plenty to last through a couple of weeks on the road, even with heavy usage. Buy this upfront, have them insert the SIM into your phone and make sure it’s connected to the Internet, and you’re off and running. You can always wait until you connect to local wifi, but trust me, the peace of mind and flexibility you get with a huge amount of data available when and where you need it are well worth the price.

You should already have downloaded the most useful apps at home. If not, visit our Apps guide for the ones you really should have on your phone.