We will be in Italy starting Oct 15, 2008, for 2 weeks, and will rent a cell phone (b4 we leave the US). There are several rental companies out there, with various offers and perks. I'm confused!!

Does anyone out there have any personal dealings or recommendations they can pass along to me?

If you plan on using the phone a lot you can just purchase a "chip" for your phone when you get there.

If you are going to just use it for emergencies, I recommend World Mobal Phone, it is about $50 and you only pay if/when you place acall.

Thanks bombasticlife, we don't even own a cell phonce ourselves, so SIMS chip not an option!

Thanks for the advice!

Mobal is okay, I guess - but the phones they sell are locked to Mobal. Telestial.com will send you an <u>un</u>locked phone (that you can use with <u>any</u> company's SIM) for $40.

I just bought a phone from callineurope.com for my son's use in Italy. They are very easy to work with. You can either order online or call them directly.

The phone was $20 and the Italian SIM card was $40. To call from Italy is $.39 per minute, and incoming calls to the cell phone are free. The minutes are billed to your credit card, so there's no need to buy more minutes over there.

My son has called me twice from Italy, and the phone seems to work great. I just ordered another one for my use in France.

Seems like a very good company to me.

Hi W,

I'm going to be in Europe in a little over a week (France/Italy), for which I'll be spending 2 weeks in Italy and decided to get an international cell phone. After a lot of research I went with callineurope.com (recommended here on Fodor's, among other companies). I've already received the phone which came with an Italian SIM card already installed. I purchased the cheapest phone they had for $19.00 plus $29.00 (one time fee) and $12.00 shipping. The phone is mine to keep for future travel to Europe at which time I have the option of paying $60.00 after a year for the service.

Good luck and happy travels.

jdc

I paid the same as jdc. It wasn't $40 for the SIM card. I paid a total of $60 for the phone and SIM card, which included the $12 shipping.

Thanks to everyone's posts. I just ordered my rental phone thru callineurope, as suggested! I ordered on-line, realized I made a mistake after I submitted my order, and b4 I could call them to straighten it out, they were calling me to reconfirm my order.
Hopefully, (I'm sure it will!) the phone delivery, and use of phone will go as smoothly