My wife and I will be traveling through Europe (with US cell phones) together but separately. We’d like to be able to stay in contact as much as possible to meet up. How does Skype work for that? If we stay on wifi, is it pretty much free? What about using it to call back to the US?
I tried to use it just now through our cell phones with the 3G off, and just the wifi on and it connected, so I’m guessing that would be fine abroad? The only problems seems to be that we both seem to need to be in the skype app at the same time as it doesn’t connect if one of us is not on it. Correct?
I also see that there are credits to buy, so that confuses me as well.
I feel like an old man for the first time in my life…
I just went to the nearest cell phone shop and bought a cheapie, and loaded it with a couple hundred minutes. I programmed it with the numbers and addresses of all my european buddies to make life easier for me. I also put in the contact info for the car rental agency, the airline we use, CitizenM hotels [my favorite places] a hotel in Frankfurt that is reasonably close to the airport and cheap and several military bases contact info.
One option is that your cell phone company may be able to rent you a world phone, which is basically a phone you borrow that acts exactly like your phone at home (same number, etc) but which works on the European network. The “world roaming” minutes are insanely expensive, so if you’re going to talk on it a lot it’s not the best option. But if you’ve got Skype to do your serious chatting on, and you just need to make brief “let’s meet at X” type calls, I believe it’s a better deal than buying a cheap pay-as-you-go phone there.