How to use your phone while traveling in Europe

How to use your phone while traveling in Europe

November 29, 2018 · Chris

You need data when you are traveling - to load maps, to keep in touch with friends and family back home, to check train schedules and more.  Here I explain how easy it is to buy a prepaid SIM card in Europe and show you how to install the prepaid SIM card into your iPhone.  Make sure your iPhone is unlocked before you leave to travel and you can easily swap out and use a new SIM card.

We’ve found that using iMessage and FaceTime with our iCloud account is the easiest way to text with other iPhone users.    

For our non-iPhone friends and family, we tell them to install the WhatsApp app and we can send texts, make phone calls and video calls all using data only.  Be sure to set this up before you travel using your US phone number.  Then you can continue using that US phone number with WhatsApp.

Another thing to note - if you do make phone calls or texts to friends back in the US, you might need to add the +1 country code to their phone number in your Contacts.  By default, none of our contacts had the +1 added and we couldn’t figure out why our calls weren’t going through at first!

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Comments

  1. KingdomofAzuria
    December 12, 2018
    This is soooo helpful!!!!!! Thank you for posting. :)
  2. Chris
    December 13, 2018
    So glad you liked it! One thing we left out is that some countries require you to identify yourself before you can register the SIM card. Specifically, Germany makes you give your passport info and do a webcam verification with a human before activating your card. And although the instructions in this video were in English, that's not always the case so just be ready to ask questions or find a wi-fi to translate if you have to. Have a great trip!

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