FREDMADCEL

This June for three weeks we will visit London,Paris then heading to the north of Spain. We use Verizon but are beyond our required use period so... A friend suggested GPS but we plan to use the train for the majority of our trip so... We also take our laptop which has served us well. Any suggestions? Also best way to book train service.

Robert2533

I'm a little confused. Verizon is useless in Europe. You'll need an unlocked quad-band phone in order to use a local UK, French or Spanish SIM card, or purchase one of the services that covers all of these areas.

jenmorg

I too am interested in this as my husband and I will be traveling from Australia to France and England later this year. Is it possible to get a sim card that will work in both countries?

xyz123

There are a lot of answers to this...because of eu regulations, roaming within the eu is cheaper than it has been in the past so yes if you get a French sim card it will work in England and vice versa.....you receive calls for free, though, only in the cvountry that issued the sim card. English sim cards are a better deal, they're literally being given away (you can have one posted to your hotel in England for free) and feature pretty cheap calls from the UK to Australia...French rates to Australia and rates on the English sim card in France will be expensive, as expensive, for example as using your Australian sim card, if your carrier in the land of Oz is gsm, roaming in England and France.

There is a company called e-kit which has some offers on the USA version of ebay...it is an Australian company so they might have offers for Australians. The one available to Americans, Canadians and Brits features free reception of calls in both France and England and relatively inexpensive calls to Australian landlines from the two countries (everything of course is relative)...you will have to do some research on that and just what is available to Australians (again e-kit is an Australian company so they should have deals for Australians)....you are not wed to only one sim card, especially when passing through England because as I noted English sim cards are FREE all over the place and while in England do feature pretty cheap (for as little as 3p/minute) calls to Australian landlines.

eutravel

I have used Call in Europe; it was a great!

Alan_CT

We've had good luck renting from Cello Mobile and this year decided to buy an inexpensive older phone for use within Europe.

My U.S. Verizon phone works in Europe (quad band, $4.99 a month plan) but calls from Europe get routed through as expensive international calls, so I carry it only to take calls from home. Saves having to give family and friends the other number and gives us two phones for when we head in separate directions.

We book trains in advance whenever possible. Try this for best rates. If you book here, use Britain as your home or it may kick you to Rail Europe, which has higher prices.

www.voyages-sncf.com/

Do use Rail Europe from France to Spain and vice versa though, because I haven't figured out how to do that any other way. And the price difference is small.

Be sure your credit card issuer has you traveling for the date you make the booking or you may be rejected.

xyz123

Alan...easy workaround for you....go to localphone.com and you can get a number with just about any US area code..there is a set up fee of I forget how much....but not much and the maintenance fee is 99¢/month....you can then via the web program the number to ring to your European cell phone...rates are very very reasonable even less than many ld carriers charge for calls to European mobiles...then simply set up call forwarding on your verizon phone to that local us number...voila people calling on your US cell phone number will have the call ring to your cell phone...trust me, it works and works fairly well (there is a slight delay on the calls as to get the low rates, local phone apparently uses a voip but then again many many ld cards to get the low rates use voip also....as an alternative you can get an e-kit us simple card that gives you a US number as well as a +44 number and program the verizon phone to call forward to the US number voila done.....

frankscheers

The best cellphone in any country, including Spain and France, is something that is multi-band. Meaning, it is either tri band or quad band.

pconte

We had terrific experience with my new Samsung Galaxy S (the flagship Android competitor to the iPhone). We used it for: e-mail, Web browsing (e.g., looking up museum info, checking on flights, reading BBC for news of the strikes), camera, video recorder, GPS, Google maps, Google translate, Interactive French dictionary, weather, note taker, Kindle reader (travel book), storing our own Word and PDF documents, keeping scanned images of our passports and booking.

If you plan to use any Internet services, be sure you understand "data roaming" services and costs. I've posted some info under the following topic:

http://www.fodors.com/community/euro...-tips-info.cfm