Once you've used up the talk time and text messages included in a roaming plan, yes, it's best to use What'sApp, Skype, and other communication apps <b>on wifi </b>. However, in the context where you said that, it sounded like you were advising using those exclusively.

I myself would use up the 100 mb long before the 100 minutes. And I probably don't send 100 text messages in six months.

Progol we bought the Co-pilot app a few years back and I just checked it out to see if there are any improvements. Google maps is light years ahead in terms of being user-friendly. Where Google can guess your destination from a name of a hotel, for example, it is painful inputting addresses one line at a time into the Co-pilot app.

Just for your information, because it is fairly costly.

On the other hand, you might not mind that. It's similar to a gps unit that comes with a rental car.

I find that we have driven 15 minutes in the wrong direction before co-pilot is finally ready to go.

We have never tried navmii though.

Sundried,
Thanks for your feedback on co-pilot. The few comments I've found on Navmii are very positive so I will be trying that out. Google maps, provided the maps are downloaded prior the trip, should be a good option. And, from what I've read, Apple maps uses much less data (tho unlike Google, there doesn't seem to be a way to download the maps). But the comments on Apple maps also seems vey positive, so I'm hopeful that there are now plenty of options.

Oh thanks for that tip, I haven't tried Apple maps for a long time. I'll have to give it a try.

bvlenci - Haha, I'm the opposite. I text incessantly and hardly make voice calls anymore.

Just an update: we used the Verizon international plan with little problem, although I did forget to turn the data off at the beginning and ended up using the allotted data in a few days. Once I turned data off, we were fine.

The BEST thing I learned here, however, was that I can download Google maps of the regions we will be traveling before the trip while on WiFi. I did this before we left and used Google maps (data off!) for our entire trip, and it worked brilliantly! I'm still amazed by this, but happily, this was easy as can be and saved us many times over (except for the occasional "oops", but that's another story!).

Just thought I'd share our success here!

Glad to hear it worked out.

The only issue with using Google Maps offline is that you do not real-time traffic information but depending on where you are going, having real-time traffic info might not be a necessity.

The traffic wasn't an issue for us so the Google maps worked extremely well for us. There were several hard-to-find places that would've been difficult to find without the Google maps.