Help me use my phone in another country.

[judyblume14]

Please save me a call to Verizon Customer Service!

We're going on our first kid-free vacation next week (woohoo!) to the Caribbean. We will be out of the country from the 24th to the 30th.  My billing cycle ends on the 31st. I have 5g of data left this month.

I have a Samsung Galaxy S8. 

The hotel (a Sandals resort) has free wi-fi (I'm sure it's spotty).

I want to:
-be able to call home / receive calls from home.  Maybe 15 minutes/day.
-send/receive picture text messages...  OR send pix through facebook messenger if that makes more sense
-fart around on facebook or intagram a little bit

Do I need to get an add on plan? Or can i get by on my regular plan. There's no reason I'd be using "extra" data, right? Do you spend more if the data is used internationally? Plus, i've got the hotel wi-fi?
And what about phone calls?  I haven't traveled internationally in about 4 year, but I don't remember buying a supplemental plan?

[phdmomma]

Yes, you need a supplemental plan if you don’t want to be charged crazy data, text, and voice rates. Verizon has a travel pass that you can buy for about $10 per day and only on the days you use it ( they text you). Totally worth it when I was in South America in November.

[twinmomma]

I second Verizon Travel Pass. You can log into your account and activate it ahead of time so that as soon as your phone knows it's in a different country when you land, it'll kick on. (Or something like that...) I have mine set to automatically do it, I get a text message each day letting me know Travel Pass is turning on, and it just does it. Super easy!

[judyblume14]

THANK YOU. I was just wondering if the $60 I'd use spend on travel Pass was less than the fees I'd incur by otherwise using my phone as per usual.

[judyblume14]

And I'm just seeing that international voice is $1/min... so that answers my question!

[sdlaura]

When we went to Europe I just turned off all cellular data and used Wi-Fi.

[2chatter]

I’m with sdlaura - we didn’t make personal phone calls so I really just wanted email/FB.

DH picks up international plans and expenses them but this does make me wonder if ATT has a travel plan too because that’s awesome.

[katrine05]

I use an app called WhatsApp to text, make calls, video chat that uses Wi-Fi.

[sdlaura]

I'm pretty sure I was able to FaceTime audio calls just using wifi. Google turned up some info...

finance.yahoo.com/news/how-to-make-free-wifi-calls-on-your-iphone-with-85652974279.html