Cell Phone Rentals
 

Has anyone used "Travel Cell" for cell phone rentals? Any feedback, good or bad is greatly appreciated!

November 2003 we rented 4 phones. With mail delivery, rental, endless accessories, etc. the cost was $800.00 We took them to Paris. We tried for several days, all over the City, with in a few feet of each other, between hotel rooms, across the aisle of a train, a bus, the airport, a restaurant. We were never able to get a call through. Travel cell refused to refund one cent. Not a good experience.

I am sorry to hear about your experience with Travel Cell. I appreciate your comments and thought their current offer was too good to be true.

gig: I don't know how long you would need the phone but you can buy used phones at various phone stores...now I am speaking about London at this point because that's what my neice did and she was in London. The phone was cheap...she could call the US and her father could reach her from the US on her phone. She bought blocks of minutes as she needed them. Not sure what she did with the phone when she came back home. I don't know if this would be do-able in other cities. Just throwin' out an idea here.

Why on earth waste time and energy hiring a phone - especially in America - or buying a second hand one? Practically every shop in Europe sells them new for about £30. £10 of pre pay vouchers on top of that will keep you going for a week.

Do join the 21st century.

Ouch Flanneruk! I am just exploring all possibilities and since this is my first adventure to Europe a little patience and understanding would be nice! I appreciate your insight & will look into purchasing a phone upon my arrival in Shannon.Thanks.

Well I have to agree that renting a cell phone is going to be much more expensive than buying one - even if you only plan on one trip - and who plans on only one trip to Europe?!

If you buy a phone once you get to whatever country you are going to though you need to be careful that it is not "locked" to that country's plan. Otherwise you won't be able to use it (at least not cheaply) in any other European country. We bought a used phone in France last year and it worked great there, but then we found it was locked to the French phone company it originally came from so was useless in Italy and England. (Well you could use it but then the cost of calls was very high,)

We bought a triband unlocked phone on ebay for $45 plus 10$ shipping. Also, I checked with my cellular phone company (Cingular) and I was "due" an upgrade go I got a quad band phone from them (had to pay extra for that phone, but no where near as much as buying it new). But you need to check to see if it either is, or can be, "unlocked" when you get it from an American cellphone company. But now we have two phones that we can use all over the US and Europe and for less than the cheapest rental that I found.