Activating Your Cell Phone Abroad

TTT 6
===

Meggan: Welcome back everyone to the travel mug podcast and more importantly, travel tip Tuesday. I know it's the short in between episode where Jenn and I impart little nuggets of travel wisdom to you to make your adventures just that much better. So this week we wanted to discuss something that Peter and I have yet to do, but we said we would, we just haven't had the chance anyway, but we will be doing it every trip going forward with the exception of all-inclusive vacations.

Whenever the heck, any of them. We'll just say that, you know and what that is, is having at least one of our cell phones activated to accept phone calls and that has data, whatever country we're traveling in. So I understand it isn't in everyone's budget. But it is something we sort of budget into our savings or have been, we've been budgeting for awhile.

But you can budget and oftentimes too, like your carrier wants to make more money. So they, they do offer a little plans that aren't too crazy, oftentimes options for when you do travel international. So explore those, but I really do feel like activating one phone has a lot of advantages, including safety, I think almost first and foremost.

Um, A contact for family emergencies or just a quick hello, if you're missing home um, emergencies while you're out on the road. So let's say you're doing a road trip and something goes wrong with your rental car. And it's a way for accommodations to get in touch with you. So this especially applies to Airbnbs where you need a code to get in the door and they oftentimes don't send those out till the day before.

Cause they don't want people running around town with all their codes too far in advance. That actually happened to us. And we were outside of Airbnb in Dublin. The guy didn't show up when he was supposed to we had no service and there was therefore no way to communicate. We had to walk up and down the streets trying to like find free wifi.

We eventually, somehow did. We were able to get in touch with them and, you know, but it was a panic for a while, but if we had a phone that was just on data that way you could take calls or emails it would have been so much simpler. So this is one thing that we've talked about, making sure we do going forward.

And then I also think ever since we've planned this, we've never traveled. So maybe like, were we patient zero, look at them out there trying to live their lives. So Jenn is that something you've ever thought of or done on the road or how have you handled.

Jenn: Yeah. So the last couple of trips that we've taken outside of Canada, were to Florida. And we definitely used the cell phone plan that we have now. So it was like seven ish dollars a day, I think, to have your phone work as normal, which is perfect. So that's what we use. We didn't use it when we went to Europe, we did the free wifi thing and it is way less convenient for sure. So I think probably going forward, we probably do you that I would think. It's not something I've thought a lot about. Cause I haven't thought about going overseas that much, I guess

Meggan: right. And the safety thing makes a lot of sense.

Jenn: It totally does. And we were talking about that the other night, cause we were talking about my ill-fated road trip. If you want to scroll back and listen to the road trip tips.

But basically we had a MapQuest map and we were very lost and we did not know where to go and having a cell phone, we didn't have a smartphone back then. It was like 2010. But having a smartphone now,would have made that totally not happen at all. Cause we would have went on Google maps and it would have told us where to go and then we would have been fine. So I would definitely want to have it on a road trip, a hundred percent,

Meggan: especially in a foreign country. You just never know. And I, again, if you're budgeting for travel, just include this as part of it. Once you do your research, find out what your carrier provides and go from there.

Jenn: Absolutely. I, I would definitely recommend that, you know, in the world we live in today. It's just nice to have a way to get people, to get in touch with you.

Meggan: Exactly. Well, everybody that is that for this week's travel to Tuesday, we hope you find it helpful and happy traveling. If you're out there, be safe and until next time, bye.