August 4, 2003 -- A cell phone can be invaluable on a foreign trip. 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 guy you met on the Paris-Rome Express.
On a trip to London in July, my rented cell phone helped me cut through confusion and doubt several times -- finding out why a friend of mine was late for tea (she took the wrong train), figuring out when to meet my girlfriend after her business event, and checking up on my cat-sitter at home.
This month, cell phone rental provider TravelCell is offering half-off their $29.95 weekly rental fee to readers of this Frommers.com Newsletter only. To get this deal, call 877/CELLPHONE and specify promo code FRHPR or go to www.travelcell.com/tcap.asp?ag=FRHPR. Order by August 31 for trips within the next six months to get the special rate. This deal makes Travelcell's weekly rental rate up to $35 cheaper than competitors' rates.
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, and TravelCell's rates have gone up since we last reported on them in May. Calls within the UK are 69¢ per minute; calls to Europe are 79¢, per minute and calls to the US are 89¢ per minute. Within western Europe, incoming calls cost $.99/minute and outgoing calls cost $1.69/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 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 and Italy, 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 terrific.
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