Staying in touch with your near ones despite being placed abroad – What are your options?

Do you have a habit of traveling abroad occasionally? Or does work compel you to travel abroad at times? Whichever may be your case, you must always be looking for options of staying in touch with the near and dear ones whom you’ve left back at home. In an ideal situation, you would love to reach out to them and let them reach you too. But due to geographical distance, this is not always possible. You would also wish to make local calls to restaurants, hotels, airlines, theaters and other such places.

2 decades back, you had to pick the landline phone at the hotel, feed in the number and then call. But now with the advancements in the field of technology, making free international calls has become easier than before. You’ve got lot more options these days to stay in touch with your family members. Here are few ways that you can adopt.

1. Utilize your smartphone and use calling cards

The easiest and perhaps the most convenient option is to use your mobile phones. However, just check whether or not your mobile phone has the required configuration to work overseas. In case you’re not sure, you can check with the service provider. When you have a regular smartphone, you can stay connected everywhere by being able to make calls. But in case you need to communicate a lot, you can opt for international calling cards through which you can get free minutes of calls to any international number, whether to a cell phone or to a landline phone or even to VoIP devices.

2. Opt for the VoIP options and stay app-happy

Do you have a tablet or a smartphone? If answered yes, there are few apps that you can download in order to make free international calls. You can not only make voice calls but also make video calls through these VoIP apps. These calls are made through the internet and you require a Wifi hotspot for your phone to receive uninterrupted internet connection. The calls that you make through this app are either free of cost or they will cost you a negligible amount. You may also opt for a local SIM card and combine this option to save more.

3. Add international features to the phone that you already have

This option depends entirely on your service provider and this can sometimes be a costly option and sometimes a cheap one. You might have to invest $10 or $20 add on every month in order to get those upgrading options. You may be thinking that $10 would get you data along with texting in many places but there are other places too which can offer you even more. Hence, you have to get in touch with the present provider so that you get to know about the roaming charges that they charge you for international calls.

4. Install Skype

This is yet another way of staying in touch with your near and dear ones. All you need to do is to download and install Skype on your smartphone so that you can easily start using it. Log in with a username and a password and then add the contact with whom you wish to chat in your contact list. Once the contact has been added, you can start chatting and making video calls with that person. You will be able to hear him and see him while you chat with him. Doesn’t that sound great?

Therefore, whenever you’re traveling abroad, choose any of the above mentioned options to remain in touch with your near and dear ones.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or management of EconoTimes