May 14, 2003 -- Overseas, a cell phone can be a lifesaver. Not only can it let you keep in touch with the babysitter, the cat-sitter, the house-sitter and your boss, it can help you book restaurants and get in touch with that cool dude you met on the Paris-Rome Express.
To encourage better communication (doesn't the world need better communication?), cell phone rental provider TravelCell is offering free cell phones to all travelers. Order your phone by calling 877-CELLPHONE or going to www.travelcell.com and mentioning promotion code NR512, and they'll waive the $24.95 weekly rental fee for up to a three-month rental any time within the next year, provided you order by June 30, 2003.
Not only is the phone free, but if you're traveling to the UK, incoming calls are free. So you can stay on the phone all day in London or Leeds -- if the call is incoming -- and not pay a penny. That's an unbeatable deal.
If you want to make outgoing calls, though, you'll pay by the minute. Calls within the UK are 49¢ per minute; calls to Europe are 59¢, and calls to the US are 69¢. Within western Europe, incoming calls cost $.79/minute and outgoing calls cost $1.49/minute. In India, incoming calls are $1.99/minute and outgoing calls are $2.99/minute. In Argentina, both incoming and outgoing calls are a whopping $3.49/minute.
You'll also have to pay some shipping fees: $15 total for second-day shipping to your US address and a prepaid mailer to send the phone back to TravelCell, and $22.50 for next-day shipping. Canadians can get phones for a US$30 shipping fee.
In exchange, you get a Nokia or Motorola phone that will work in most countries except the US, Canada, South Korea, Japan, much of Africa and parts of the Caribbean. It'll have a UK phone number on the Orange network there, so people will have to make an international call to reach you -- but calls to the UK are much cheaper than calls to, say, Uzbekistan, if that's where you really are. Make sure to order the phone a few days before you leave, so you can tell your friends your temporary number before you go.
(For folks going on cruises or adventure vacations, TravelCell also rents out satellite phones, but they're not free -- they're $149.99 for the first week and $49.99 for each additional week. Softening the blow, the phones offer free incoming calls anywhere on Earth.)
Comparing Cell Costs
TravelCell's per-minute rates are very competitive with the other major cell phone rental agencies, RoadPost (www.roadpost.com) and InTouch Global (www.intouchglobal.com). They're also competitive with the international roaming plans offered by T-Mobile and AT&T Wireless, although with those, you get to keep your US cell phone number.
RoadPost and InTouch can still be cheaper in some circumstances, though. In France, Italy and Switzerland, RoadPost offers rentals that include unlimited free incoming calls for $49 for the first week, $14 for each additional week. If you're going to be on the phone a lot -- say, receiving some long conference calls -- that pays for itself within an hour of chatting.
InTouch, meanwhile, offers phones with free incoming calls in Japan for $49/week.
If you intend to be making massive amounts of calls, the cheapest way to go is still to own an unlocked GSM world phone and to buy local prepaid phone chips in your destination country. For a flat 15€ in Holland, for instance, you can get a chip with free incoming calls and 5€ worth of outgoing calls; local calls cost between 10 and 50¢/minute and calls to the US cost about 80¢/minute. But you've got to deal with the hassle of finding cell phone shops, negotiating language barriers and communicating your new temporary phone number to contacts at home.
If you don't need to be reachable, making your calls home to the US from pay phones with a locally-bought low-cost calling card can still be cheaper than using a cell phone. But for the security, convenience and ease that a cell phone provides, this TravelCell deal is truly extraordinary.
