Understanding What Not to Do When Using a Cell Phone Internationally:

What should you do with your phone if you’re traveling internationally? This is a question I get all the time, so I’ll give you some tips for if you’re traveling short-term and long-term. But first, what should you not do? You should never order one of those prepaid tourist phones that they send you in the mail before your trip. Those are always the most expensive for the least amount of internet and the slowest data speeds.

Contact Your Provider Before Traveling with Your Cell Phone Internationally:

Now, what you should do, depending on which country you’re from, is contact your cell phone provider before you leave and find out if they have an international roaming and data package. Now, for many, many years it was super expensive to do this, but the prices have actually gotten quite reasonable. So let’s say you live in the US and you are a customer of a major carrier. It may have an international data pass that you can get for $10 per day, and this works in more than 210 countries. The benefit of this is that you can use it in multiple countries. So if you fly to Europe and you’re gonna go to Portugal and Spain and France, you don’t have to get separate plans for each destination, and this is the best option if you’re gonna be going somewhere short term for just a week or so. It’s also a good option for you if you’re gonna be doing a lot of calls and texts back to the US because with this international plan, it says that you can get unlimited talk and text between the international destinations that you’re going to and the US, but this could add up because if you’re going abroad for a month, $10 a day could cost you $300 by the end of the month.

Exploring Global Plans When Using a Cell Phone Internationally:

Another option, and one that I’ve used a lot in the past, is a global international plan. They have one that is good in around 200 countries. The good thing about this is that you don’t have to do anything. You just turn your phone on when the plane lands and you can immediately connect to the local network, start texting, start using maps. The downside is that the speeds are really slow. We’re not talking 4G or 5G here, we’re talking 128 kilobits per second. So I like to have two phones. I have my normal phone with the plan, and I also have a separate unlocked phone that I can use with international SIM cards. So I like to have that plan because I can use it anywhere and it’s good enough to send messages or to use maps, but you’re not gonna wanna be downloading stuff or streaming any kind of music or video. You really can’t with speeds that are that slow. And it can also get expensive too if you wanna upgrade to a faster data plan and it’s still not even that fast.

Comparing Local SIM Cards vs. Cell Phone Internationally Plans:

Consider this. If you were to upgrade to a high-speed data package, you could get five gigs of LTE data for $35, and that’s only good for 10 days. You need to triple that to have high-speed data for a month, and it’s only giving you 15 gigs of high-speed data. In comparison, if you bought a prepaid tourist SIM card in France, for example, you could get up to 30 gigs of high-speed data for 30 euros, and that’s good for 14 or 15 days. So that would be 60 euros max, paying for high-speed data there, you’d get 60 gigs of data, and that would also cover you throughout the European Union. So you can see how it’s much more expensive to add an international data plan to your US phone compared to if you are going to buy a prepaid SIM card when you get to your destination. If you were to buy a prepaid SIM card in Romania, you could get six gigs of data that’s good for an entire month for just six euros.

Affordable Options:

Now, if you’re from the US and you’re looking at major carriers, it is more affordable to go with something like a flexible data provider that charges you per gig of high-speed data when you’re abroad. But that’s still a lot more than paying for local data in the country where you land. So one of my clients asked me, well, what does that mean? If you’re buying a prepaid SIM card in every country, does that mean that you have to change your number in each country that you go to? These days there’s a lot of other options. You can keep an international cell phone plan with a basic minimum data package or something like that. Or you can also have an online number that forwards to different phone numbers that you have. So you can use various online services that let you use a mobile number that you can answer through the internet or that can forward to your end result cellphone.

Staying Connected While Traveling:

Some websites allow you to forward your phone number anywhere and receive text messages around the world. It also includes features like voicemail, call recordings, and caller ID. So when you’re thinking about traveling to multiple countries, don’t worry about having to change your number wherever you go, because chances are you’re gonna be using your unlocked phone with a local SIM card pretty much just to use the internet. And if you need an international number or a US number for your business, then you can have that number forwarded to your international phone or you can just answer those calls online.

Avoiding Roaming Charges with Your Cell Phone Internationally:

However, if you don’t add an international roaming plan to your home country phone, then make sure to turn off the data roaming because you can get a pretty bad surprise when you get home and check out your phone bill and you’re getting charged like a hundred dollars per gigabyte of data or something like that. So go into your phone settings, turn off your international roaming data if you don’t have a plan specifically that lets you use your phone in other countries.

Using Wi-Fi and Backup Plans:

That’s also an option as well because there’s Wi-Fi pretty freely available these days. Sometimes there’s public networks that are provided by the local government or municipality, and you can also download an app, like a Wi-Fi map app or a Wi-Fi finder app that shows you where all of the networks are around you. So it’s possible that you could even travel with just using the Wi-Fi wherever you go. But I like to have an internet plan on my phone and also a backup plan. So I like to use the local SIM cards as a high-speed hotspot for my phone. I even travel with a hotspot because you can activate a 24-hour plan. So that’s also a good backup if you’re in a place where you can’t get a SIM card or you don’t want to tether to your international phone because the internet is really slow and really expensive. So one time when I was in France, I was looking all over for a SIM card for my phone before I went into the Alps, and I had to go to like five different stores to get it because I think maybe I arrived at the airport at a time when the cell phone kiosks weren’t open. And so I finally found one, but I also ended up using my hotspot and just activating a package that you can get per day, per gigabit, or even per month. If you have any other questions about what to do with your phone when traveling.