Travelfone - cutting the cost of using mobiles abroad

stripee

Hi all

I haven't posted a lot on the chat forum, but hope that this is useful to everyone. I had an email come through tonight from savastore.com who I have used in the past to buy pc stuff online. I think they are a fairly large and reputable company.

They are currently promoting a relatively new service called "travelfone" which for the cost of £30 for a sim or £70 for a mobile/sim gives you the opportunity to "save up to 85% when making calls abroad". More importantly (in my opinion) it also means you can receive calls for free in a lot of countries. List of free roaming countries available at:

http://www.travelfone.co.uk/pdf/freeroam.pdf

Here's a link to their main site:

http://www.travelfone.co.uk/index.html


And here's an example they have on what you can save in France vs other networks on a one week holiday:

• receiving 10 calls, each for 10 minutes
• making 6 calls to the UK, each for 5 minutes
• Sending 15 text messages to the UK


Travelfone O2 Orange T-Mobile Vodafone
Calls received FREE £99 £60 £55 £75
Calls made £8.70 £25 £18 £14 £19
Text messaging £4.50 £5 £7 £6 £8
Total £13.20 £129 £85 £75 £102
Saving £115 £71 £61.80 £88.80

[It took me quite a while to put spaces in to make that table look nice, and it's made no difference at all. Nevermind! ]

This seems pretty good. If you travel frequently I would imagine you can save a lot. As for whether you can be bothered to have a different number or not whilst abroad, I don't know. But it certainly seems worth a look? I'd be very interested to know Martin's opinion on this one.

If all of this is a bit much, then follow my own (simple) advice:
Option 1 - Obviously the most frugle moneysaving tip to save when abroad is to leave the damn thing at home as it's a curse. Enjoy your holiday! (and let others enjoy theirs without you receiving and sending texts all the while(personal gripe)!)

Option 2 - My own personal favourite is to call up your provider before you leave and ask them to switch off your voicemail - then at least you don't pay for someone to leave a message, and then to pick it up. (Let's face it, if it's that important they'll call back!) Then just ring and ask for it to be switched on again on your return to the uk. Simply moneysavingtastic.

All the best moneysavers. Let me know if anyone takes the plunge on travelfone!

joannemc3

cool !! , im not sure but im sure ive seen something cheaper elsewhere , it rings a bell !! anybody know !!

redux

joannemc3 wrote:

cool !! , im not sure but im sure ive seen something cheaper elsewhere , it rings a bell !! anybody know !!

stripee wrote:

I'd be very interested to know Martin's opinion on this one.

He's written about these SIMs with free roaming for almost a couple of years now, and other choices like getting a local SIM card, in his roaming article

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/cgi-bin/viewnews.cgi?newsid1119870249,48922

and here's its discussion thread

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?p=2530781#post2530781


Here's the OP's thread in the phones board

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=352091

stripee

redux wrote:

He's written about these SIMs with free roaming for almost a couple of years now, and other choices like getting a local SIM card, in his roaming article

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/cgi-bin/viewnews.cgi?newsid1119870249,48922

and here's its discussion thread

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?p=2530781#post2530781


Here's the OP's thread in the phones board

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=352091

And there was me thinking I was being original! Nevermind.