My mom and I will be in France for ten days and she inquired about calling home while we are there. I could care less about phoning home but for her sake I was considering renting a cell phone. Does anyone have any advice on using the phones in France and is a cell phone a good idea or can I just use a calling card? Thanks for any suggestions.

You can check out some other responses regarding this.<BR><BR>If you check it out, you will find it far cheaper to go into a phone store in Paris and buy the cheapest model cell phone they have. It will come with a pre paid cell plan that will cost you somewhat less than 1 Euro a minute to call the US. Actually, you can probably also buy a long distance card and call the local number in Paris. Or you can use a service like Net2Phone which has a local number in France, access the number with your cell phone and phone home. You will also have a local French telephone number and your mom can call you directly anytime anyplace anywhere using whatever long distance plan she has back here.<BR><BR>I just don't understand why people rent cell phones once you will be in a country for at least a week. It is far far cheaper to buy a cell phone. The cost of calls made on a phone rented in the US are absurd......

Oh by the way, I forgot to add. Most rental cell phones charge you to receive calls. In almost all European countries, when you buy a pre paid cell phone plan, calls you receive in that country are free to you. Only the calling party pays.<BR><BR>I've researched this topic pretty thoroughly and I just don't understand what people see in renting phones if they are going to be in one country for seven days or more.<BR><BR>And the nice thing is if you go back to France or somebody you know goes to France, you use the same cell phone. If it is inside 8 months, your French phone number is still yours. All you have to do is buy a recharge card at a phone store. If your number has expired, you buy a new service pack with a new number. All you do is open the phone, take out the SIM card that was inside it and put in a new SIM card. You might also be able to use the phone in another European country if the phone you buy is not locked into one provider or you get somebody to enter the code to unlock the phone....The Europeans are really eons ahead of the US cell carriers on this one...

Many Fodors posters have used the Sprint or MCI card available at Costco and Sam's. International rates are very low and the way to access the service is explained inside the package. We e-mail instead of phoning home from Europe, so I haven't used one of these cards, but I would seriously consider it if we phoned. <BR><BR>Have fun with your mom in France!

This has been discussed several times recently. I don't spend hours on the phone when I'm in Europe, and if you do, then this may not be a good suggestion. But I stay in smaller 3 star hotels. Whenever I have called back to the US and dialed direct from my hotel, the charge has been less than most phone cards or special rates offered by my home phone company. For example a call from my hotel in France that lasted about 10 minutes, costs maybe $2 or $3. Another in Berlin that was easily 15 minutes long, cost $3.00. If you are staying in big American style hotels like a Rome Hilton or something, forget it, they will sock you big, but for small family run hotels, they will normally just pass on their rate which is often a special rate to begin with.