Although the other parts of this article have been talking primarily about cell phones and related wireless service, there are some other issues that can also help you keep conveniently and affordably in contact with your friends and family back home.

How to make international calls when traveling

International calls are of course the most expensive type of calls to make from your cell phone. Here are a couple of strategies to reduce your international phone call costs.

Make a very brief call and ask the person you're speaking to if they will call you back if they have good international rates from their phone. If you have a local pre-paid SIM, when they call you back you'll probably find the incoming call is free to you and a lot less expensive for them to make than if you made the call.

If you're calling someone that you don't want to impose on to call you back, consider our return call service. With this service you place a call to a special phone number in the US, then hang up before the call is answered. This call is free to you, because the call wasn't answered. Next, a computer monitoring the phone number you called will then automatically call you back at the phone number you've programmed into the service (probably to your cell phone) and when you answer the returned call, you then have US dial tone and can place a call anywhere in the world at discounted low US rates.

Keep a copy of your SIM card's phone directory

What would happen if you lost or broke your phone and all the pre-programmed numbers on its SIM card? Or perhaps you have two or more SIM cards and want to copy your phone book to each SIM card.

Our SIM backup unit is just the thing for these situations. It can be used to keep a backup of your phone book information, and to copy it between SIM cards to prevent all the fiddly entering of names and phone numbers that you'd otherwise have to do.

Buy Your Prepaid SIM Cards before leaving the US

You might think we have a vested interest in encouraging you to buy your prepaid SIM cards from us rather than from somewhere in the countries you visit, and of course, we do. But there are sensible and important reasons for you to do this as well.

The first reason is shifting any possible problems or hassles away from your journey and to your planning phase before you start your travels. When you land in a foreign country, your time is precious and you want to spend it primarily either enjoying yourself (if on vacation) or productively (if traveling for business). There is no way of knowing how long it might take you to find a shop and buy a prepaid SIM card.

Maybe you arrive on a day or at a time when the shops are closed. Maybe it will be a day or two before your itinerary gets you to a town or city with a cell phone store that cells prepaid SIMs. Maybe when you find a store, they are temporarily out of stock. Maybe when you put the SIM in your phone you discover it doesn't work – perhaps the phone is locked, or the SIM is bad, or who knows what.

Meanwhile, you've got a useless cell phone with no service, and a mounting level of frustration. All of this can be avoided by simply getting the SIM card from us before you leave. This will mean you too can be one of those travelers who switches their phone on as soon as they leave the plane!

The second reason is also important. In most cases, when you get a prepaid SIM card from us, you're also given its phone number. This means, if you get the SIM before leaving, you can tell your friends, family, and colleagues before you leave what your number will be while you're traveling, and you can also advise people you plan to have contact with overseas what your cell phone number will be when you arrive in their country. Again, this shifts the planning and preparation for your journey into the time before you leave, where it belongs, rather than compressing it into the more limited time once you arrive.

Lastly, if you buy a SIM card from us, you have access to friendly responsive English-language support to walk you through anything you might need to know or do to get your SIM working in your phone. That is probably important, too!

Beware of Hotel Phones

Every week we have someone writing to tell us a horror story about an unexpectedly huge hotel phone bill they ran up while traveling. You can find yourself paying up to $10/minute just to call back to the US if you use the phone in your hotel room. Even calls across town can sometimes cost $1/minute.

Using an international GSM phone and prepaid SIM service, together with the other calling strategies in this section will almost always be a better choice than using the hotel phone.