ok..cell phone use is confusing!! I can get a travel plan but quite expensive. It seems the best way is to get a sim card in Croatia. Are these pretty foolproof. Does anyone have suggestions of the best ones to get. Plan to use wifi as much as possible but will need some data for sure. We will be in Croatia for 2 weeks and Slovenia for one week. Thanks for your help.

If you have a phone that will work on European frequencies (check with your provider), get the SIM card in the first country of your trip, be it Croatia or Slovenia. Intra-EU roaming is much easier nowadays so you can generally use the SIM card in another EU country without any surcharges, the only caveat is a potentially smaller data allowance for EU roaming. Only a handful of plans have roaming disabled. Note that Bosnia is not part of the EU, so expect steep fees for using the SIM card on a Bosnian network if you happen to venture there.

In Slovenia, Hot Mobil and Izimobil provide the best value at the moment. Hot Mobil offers the Hot Maxi plan with 3000 minutes and texts anywhere in the EU, 20 GB in Slovenia and 2.73 GB in the EU at €9.99 for 30 days. Izimobil offers the Izimesec L plan with 6000 units (minutes/texts/MB) in Slovenia and the EU at €11.99 for 30 days. The following website has a good overview of prepaid options in Croatia: Croatia | Prepaid Data SIM Card Wiki | FANDOM powered by Wikia

Thank you so much..I will check that website.

You also need to make sure your phone is unlocked so you can use a different SIM in it. If you bought the phone from a carrier, it is almost certainly locked. But if the phone is paid off, your carrier should unlock it for free upon request. However, you really need to do this BEFORE you leave for Croatia! (If you are American and you use say Verizon, their phones generally are NOT locked. AT&T phones generally ARE locked though.) When you get a phone unlocked, your carrier gives you an unlock code - which you will use only after you put the new SIM into the phone. Insert the SIM in Croatia, power on the phone, and type in the unlock code you received - and after you type it once, you should never need to type it again. But you need to remember to bring the unlock code with you to Croatia!

Buying a Croatian SIM means getting a Croatian phone number while that SIM is in place - and not having access to your regular number for calls and texts, FYI.

If you go to Bosnia for any length of time, you can always buy another SIM there - they are super cheap. Note that if you drive north from say Dubrovnik to Split in Croatia, you must cross through (border crossings with passport checks) a tiny slice of Bosnia called the Neum Corridor. It's possible you will pick up mobile towers in Bosnia driving through there (not sure - the Neum Corridor isn't very long). To be safe, personally I'd put the phone in airplane mode while you drive through here, to avoid possible roaming charges.

Thanks Andrew. We are actually from Canada, where we apparently pay the highest fees in the world for cell phone use. I have looked at a travel plan so I can keep my number but for $100 only get 100mb of data plus calls and texts. Looks like there are a lot of wifi spots so maybe I can get away with that. I am downloading maps to my phone so I can check those without data. We leave in 3 weeks so have to get things figured out!!!

Just check with your carrier and make sure you can get an unlock code for your phone before you leave, so you can use a Croatian SIM card. Again, bring a copy of the code with you to Croatia - you won't need it until the first time you insert the new SIM card.