Staying in touch with friends and family while you’re on the road abroad can be an expensive challenge. Calling home on your US cell phone will cost you around $2 per minute from many countries. Forget using hotel phones: those are even more. But staying in touch doesn’t have to expensive. Since some Boomers/Seniors are tech savvy and some aren’t, we’ll cover the basics.
Here are our tried and tested tips and tricks to get it done free or for very low cost.
-
Use a Messaging App on Your Cell Phone.
Here’s a summary of the apps that are most used.
- Skype
- Facebook Messenger
- We Chat
You will need to download the app to your phone, preferably before you leave, and make sure the friends or family you want to stay in touch with also have the app downloaded. Do a couple of test calls while you’re in the US so you know it works. Then, when you are away, you can call phone to phone or phone to computer with texts, audio calls or video calls – as long as you have a data connection available.
These apps are free, and so are the calls, so you can talk for a long time without worrying about the costs. You just have to pay attention to the data you are using.
2. Don’t Roam Without A Plan!
DON’T use these apps without being sure you have free or cheap data to use. A rookie mistake some people make is to turn on their phone in a foreign country and let it roam on the local carrier’s network using your home cell phone account. Then a WhatsApp call back home could easily cost you $100 in data charges. This is because the US cell phone companies charge such a huge premium for overseas data roaming – often $25 a Megabyte. So turn off the Cellular Data setting on your phone the minute you get on the plane to avoid this inadvertently happening to you. And putting your phone in airplane mode is not enough, because when you turn that off on the other side, your phone will want to start roaming for data unless you have turned off the cellular data switch in Settings.
3. Getting the Data You Need
There are two main ways to get the data you need to use Messaging Apps for low or no cost.
Free Wifi
Almost every country offers wifi free to hotel guests, restaurant patrons, airport visitors etc. Many cities have free wifi networks in parks, or even blanketing the whole city. The way to find an available free wifi network you can use to call home is to ask your hotel or restaurant. If you’re out and about and are not at one of those places, look for the list of networks that pop up when you turn on your wifi in settings. Those that don’t require a password will show that they are an open network. Often you will be asked to register an email address in exchange for using the wifi. Be CAREFUL! If you’re in a famous department store, for example, it’s probably fine to join their network as long as you don’t mind getting emails from them later. But if you are in public, it’s a judgement call: you could be putting your personal info at risk if the network is unknown. In general, we recommend using the wifi at your hotel or a restaurant, where you are not required to register an email address and they are giving you access as a customer benefit. Ironically, some old school expensive hotels still charge for wifi access, probably figuring their guests are too rich to know better, so be aware of hidden charges and ask if the data is free.
Cellular data
This is the data that is provided not via local wifi, but over the national cellular networks, the same way as your cell phone gets data at home. The big difference is the local price versus international roaming. If you don’t want to be confined to being in touch only while you are in wifi range, then buy a local SIM card for your cell phone. You can do this at a local cell carrier counter at the airport or at just about any convenience store anywhere. The sales clerks will almost always remove your existing SIM card and activate the local one for you and prove the data connection is working. DO NOT lose your existing card, because you will need it to have your phone work when you get home. (It’s usually best kept by taping it to the plastic card your new SIM card comes with and slipping it into your wallet. You will swap it back into your phone when you get home; any kid will help you with this). A local prepaid data plan will cost you about $5-$25 in most countries, and that will give you plenty of data (say 2-5 Gigabytes) for the duration of your trip. (Obviously rates differ widely by country). Apart from its many other uses, you can use the data to call home for free using communications apps from your phone. Some older phones require the permission of your carrier (it’s called “unlocking”) to allow the use of a foreign SIM card. If you are in doubt, call your home carrier before you leave to check (tip: dial 611 on your cell phone to make a free call to your carrier). You can buy a combination of data and prepaid calling minutes if you like, meaning you can also use the phone to call home at a much lower rate than if you were roaming. Ask the clerk how much an overseas call deducts from your balance so you can get a sense of how many prepaid minutes to buy. These minutes can also be useful to make local calls in the country you’re in.
Once you have a working data connection and you know the cost (if any) of your data, then call away on your Messaging App to whoever also has the app installed on their computer.
Pro Tip: If the person you want to call doesn’t have a cell phone or doesn’t use these apps, you can still call them on their phone, whether it’s a landline or cell phone, using your data and an app. The easiest app for this purpose is Skype. Just add a credit card to your Skype account and that will allow you call from your Skype account, using data on your side, to a phone on the other side. They charge as little as 2c per minute, so it’s well worth signing up for this, versus paying $2 a minute if you’re dong international roaming.
4. Use POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service)
If you don’t want to mess with apps and all that smart phone stuff, then there are a couple of ways to go.
As we mentioned above, you don’t want to be paying for international roaming with no plan. However, US carriers have started to address the need for reasonable international roaming costs by introducing bundles that actually make sense if you have limited days you want to use your phone overseas.
If you have an AT&T account for your cell phone, you can buy the International Day Pass, which costs $10 per day for unlimited calling, texting or data on the days that you use it. It’s a good thing to have if you don’t plan to use the phone every day of your trip.
Verizon’s Above Unlimited plan gives users 5 day passes (meaning no extra charge for international roaming) per month. T-Mobile also has a roaming option. Since these plans change often, it’s best to call your carrier before you leave to find out your options.
Another cheap way to make regular phone calls is to buy a prepaid SIM, using the process described above. You don’t have to buy data – you just buy phone minutes to call back home, usually at very low rates.
Finally, if you’re really old school, you can buy a calling card that lets you make cheap international calls from a payphone.
Whichever way you go, it’s cheaper and easier to call home than ever before, so there’s no reason to be out of touch.
