Uh-Oh, Your Phone Doesn’t Work Overseas. So Rent One.
If your phone won’t work where you are going and you don’t want to buy, there are lots of rental options. You may be able to rent from your carrier, which has one advantage — your rental phone will have the same number as your regular phone, your voice- mailbox doesn’t need to be changed and your preferences are preserved. Verizon will rent a GSM phone for $3.99 a day. The downside is that the per-minute call fee is roughly the same as roaming minutes, not the cheapest way to make a call.
You might find a better deal with a third-party rental. For example, Cellhire is renting phones for about $29 a week during its current promotion (there is almost always a special promotion).
Outgoing call rates aren’t terribly low (about $2 to $6 a minute from the bulk of common tourist spots to the States), but they’re possibly better than your own cellphone’s and almost certainly better than a hotel phone. Cellhire also offers a premium Follow Me service, which transfers calls made to your home or office phone to your rental phone without callers being able to tell (in case you want to sneak out of the office and go to Spain without anyone knowing). That service raises the rate on incoming calls — from $1.49 to $2.78 if you’re in España, for instance.
For more information about Cellhire, click here.
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