How to use your smartphone overseas with Verizon Wireless

As fairly frequent overseas travelers, Carol and I have been rather frustrated with the $500+ Verizon Wireless phone bills we come home to after each trip.  As we are luxury travel bloggers as well as travel agency owners, we use quite a bit of data when we’re traveling.

In the past, I’d pay Verizon $40 (times two phones) to turn on my international usage for a month and then we’d pay them $25/mb of data.  And because I’m tweeting during the day, depending on where we are, it was nothing for us to consume $25 and many times $50/day in data usage.  Hence the $500+ phone bills.

I know, I could always wait until the evening and use WiFi, but if you’re on a cruise ship, WiFi is currently nearly worthless.  With that said, however, as river cruise ships are inland, we’ve found fabulous cellular and WiFi service on these ships.

Enter the New Verizon Wireless TravelPass

Competition is a wonderful thing, and it would seem that competition has forced the large legacy carriers to become more competitive in their wireless plan pricing.

Now, with our Verizon Wireless Travel Pass, we pay $5/day in Canda/Mexico and $10/day in Europe.  And, the feature only activates when/if we use it.  And further, this daily fee brings our U.S. wireless plan with us.

Therefore, if we’re in Europe for two weeks, I’ll be spending $140/phone to have cellular and data service on Europe’s 4G networks with our 4Gig plan available to us.

Nice, that will cut our cellular bill in half when traveling to Europe.

Now, Enter KeepGo

In my never-ending quest to save money when traveling overseas, and have access to high-speed data networks, I have recently become acquainted with a company called KeepGo.

KeepGo can connect you to wireless networks around the world with either a Sim Card for your phone or a Mobile WIFI Hotspot device. Here are a few screenshots from their website to make you a little more familiar with their service.

The nice folks at KeepGo just sent Carol and me one of their Hotspot devices to test and share with you.  The device we have sells for $129 and come preloaded with 1Gig of data available nearly anywhere in the world. Then, after you use your Gig, you can fill it up again with 3Gigs costing only $85. Sweet.  Right?

We’ll use it on our next journey outside of the United States and report back to you on our findings. Stay tuned. 😀
 
If you enjoyed this article, sign up for our travel newsletter to keep abreast of our best travel tips, on-location reviews, exclusive travel offers, group travel events, and much more.

Roaming Boomers Travel Services is an Independent Affiliate of Cadence, a Virtuoso® member. CST#201120-40