Travelling isn’t always about saving money – but when you’re on the gap year of your life, or working abroad for a few months to get experience of a new country, or taking your year as a foreign exchange student: money can be tough. You want to call home but you don’t want to spend your whole week’s budget on half an hour talking to your mum.
- Calling Home While Travelling AbroadRavages / Travel Photos / CC BY-NC-SA
So what do you do? You follow our six top tips to saving money and still phoning home…
1: Use the Internet
The cheapest international calls of all don’t cost anything – because you make them using an internet talk provider like Skype. With a decent internet connection you can talk face to face, with no glitches or freezing either. In fact, talking on the web in many countries outside the UK is much easier than within the UK, as the British Isles now has one of the slowest internet connection rates in the developed world.
Be aware that you will still pay for the time you spend in an internet café.
2: Use a Calling Card
Calling cards are designed for cheap international calls. They allow the user to connect to a third party service from any phone, by dialling a designated number and entering a personal code. The service then charges at a cheap rate, allowing long phone calls to different parts of the world without spending large quantities of money. Some cards even offer special discounts at certain times of year to different countries.
3: Buy a Local Mobile
Depending on where you are, it can actually be cheaper to buy and use a local mobile, for calls out to other countries as well as within those countries. The cost of call-in on local mobile networks varies greatly from country to country, of course, so it is advised that the traveller researches how much he or she will actually pay before he or she begins to make calls abroad in this fashion.
4: Use a Pay As You Go Service
However you do it – on a local mobile or using an international calling card – making calls with prepaid credit means you can’t possibly run over your communications budget without going to the store and getting some more credit. In some cases, this may mean that cheap international calls (for example if you use a local pay and go mobile service) actually translate to “short international calls” – but at least you will know that you did your duty without breaking your bank.
5: Reverse the Charges
Depending on who you are calling, and why, it may be appropriate to reverse the charges. To do this, you need to get in touch with an operator who can then put you through on a reverse charge call to the party you are trying to reach. That person then accepts the reversed charges and pays for the cost of the call through his or her phone bill. Reverse charges can be appropriate for family calls in some situations, and give you a way of reaching people at home if there is an emergency.
6: Use a Local Phone
It is normally the case that local phones (i.e. landlines) are cheaper to use than mobiles. It may, then, be worth talking to the owner of your guest house (for example) and offering to pay for the use of their phone.
In general terms, though, the wide availability and usage of international calling cards when you are overseas makes this the most popular and common way to get cheap international calls. Just be aware that when you use a calling card you will be required to pay different rates to connect to the third party service depending on the kind of phone you are using – and that different numbers may apply for different types of phone too.
