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 Communication for Travelers |
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Verbal communication with family and friends along with personal business calls is a very important aspect of your journey that you need to think about and plan for. In this article, I’ll explore the best and cheapest ways to communicate both within the country you are in and internationally. While we were in the United States, we found the cheapest way to make a telephone call was to use a calling card. There are many calling cards available in a wide range of rates. Check them all out and find the one with the best rate – frequently available through Costco. Although we got a great rate with our calling card, they tacked on an extra dollar if we called from a pay phone. Since we didn’t make many calls and we tried to use a private phone whenever possible to avoid the extra one-dollar charge, this was our cheapest and most convenient option. Another option you have is to carry a cell phone. If you are planning to remain in one country for an extended period of time – and will be making quite a few calls within the country - it might be worth it to buy a cell phone. Rather than getting a long-term service plan, simply get the prepaid kind and buy more airtime as needed. You can use the phone as much or as little as you want. Be aware that text messages are much, much cheaper than talking, so take advantage of that feature whenever possible. When you change countries, however, chances are that your phone will not work. Many cell phones are “locked” to prevent them from being used throughout the world. In some countries, you can find someone to “unlock” the phone, then you simply need to buy a new SIM card (which is cheap) and the phone is good to go. Depending on where you are, it may be quite easy to get your phone unlocked, or it might prove to be way more hassle than it is worth. In that case, you will have to decide if you’ll use the phone enough to warrant buying a new one. Most of the calls you’ll make, however, will most likely be to family and friends or to businesses back in your home country. If you have your own computer the cheapest way I know of to make these international calls is with Skype. Simply download a free program from them, get it set up on your computer, and you are good to go. You can call from your computer to a land line for a fee. This fee is based on which country you are calling to (see chart). If someone else has Skype on their computer and is online, you can call them for free. What I usually do is to call from my computer to a family or friend’s land line and tell them to get log onto Skype. I then call from my computer to theirs for free. I’ve talked for hours and it only cost a few pennies. You can set your computer to automatically log you in to Skype every time you turn on your computer. That way, your friends can see at a glance if you are online and can call you. Alternately, you can set it to manual, and you’ll have to log in whenever you want to use Skype. To pay for the calls on Skype, we use PayPal. With PayPal, you can transfer money from your bank account to your Skype account so you don’t have to pay each time you make a call. We’ve got ours set up to automatically recharge, so when the balance drops to $1 they automatically transfer more from our bank to Skype – we don’t even have to consider running out of money in the middle of a call. If you are going to use Skype be sure your computer has built in speakers and microphone. I can’t recall seeing a laptop nowadays that doesn’t have them. In fact, most seem to come with a built in camcorder so if the person you are calling is on a computer, they can actually see you. With some computers you might have to check out the quality of the speakers and microphone. I’ve seen some that have pretty bad quality. There are disadvantages of Skype too:
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