I am leading a student trip to England and France in a few weeks, and my travelers are asking me what is the cheapest and best way for them to call home. I had to tell them that I have NEVER called home from Europe! I always just email or instant message, either from my hotel or an internet café. Even when I stayed in France for 2 months, I never called home - I bought a cell phone, and for 5 cents a minute, my family called me since incoming cell calls in France are free.

I am guessing a pre-paid card is the way for these students to go, but should they buy a card here before they go or wait and buy one there? And I guess if they buy it there, they might need one for England and a different one for France?

The travel company we are using (Explorica) offers a phone card - so maybe they should just buy that and eliminate any hassle?

Phone cards are really inexpensive in Europe. If they buy them in England, the merchant can direct you to the best ones for what you need. I often get America 1st (The name is actually Amer<b>1st</b>ca w/ the 1 reprsenting the i in America) It has REALLY cheap rates to the States and is usable from either the UK or France. Whichever vendor you decide on - there will be different denominations - &pound;5, &pound;10, etc. Don't let them overbuy since the per minute cost is just pennies.

But e-mail is also really easy using internet cafes in both London and Paris.

We always give our daughter a MCI calling card to use. They sell them at Costco and are quite cheap.

If you are in charge of high school students, who are minors and whose parents probably want to talk to them at least once, I would just buy one cheap cell phone and sim card when you arrive and let everyone use it once (or as needed) to call home. They can get pre-paid phone cards to use in case of emergency, or if they're separated from the group they can then call you on that one cell phone.

The pre-paid cards sometimes have so many numbers that calling can be tricky. We used them once, several years ago, and it was not only a hassle to try to figure out the right sequence of numbers, it was not that easy to find phones that accept them anymore.

The cards bought stateside like at Costco aren't bad - but the ones available in the UK are quite a bit cheaper per minute (probably important for teenagers who will likely want to talk a lot)

You don't say how large the group is - if it is small, renting or buying a cell phone might be a good idea. But if there are 15 or 20 or more kids, I don't think a single cell phone would fly . . .

If you buy cards in the US, remember to buy one marked for international use (rates are better) and call the customer service number and get access phone numbers for France and UK. Many no longer print the numbers on the back of the card due to lack of space.

Also, some have different 800 numbers for hotels vs public phones. At least, this was the case for a card I bought from Walmart last year.

In the UK, the best card I found (last summer) was from the Post Office.