Verizon introduced a daily flat rate for international travelers. (Photo: Chris McGinnis)
If Verizon is your smartphone carrier and you travel the world a lot, you have a new option called TravelPass. Priced at $2 a day per line in Mexico and Canada and $10 a day in around 100 other countries, the new plan lets you “take your domestic talk, text and data allowances with you,” Verizon says.
The $2 per day deal is excellent for quick trips to Mexico and Canada. But that $10 daily fee elsewhere still seems pretty high, even though it’s at least better than Verizon’s current monthly plans.
Once you sign up for TravelPass, the fee kicks in when you receive a call, connect to a data service, or send a text inside one of the 65+ countries where it works. Once that 24 hours is up, the daily fee won’t kick in again until you receive a call, connect to a data service, or send a text – at which point another TravelPass day will begin.
To sign up go to MyVerizon.com and select “manage international services” or use the MyVerizon app on your phone to activate it before embarking on a trip. Once at your destination, you’ll receive a text message welcoming you to the country and reminding you of the service and the daily fee.
Besides the flat daily fee, TravelPass assesses no per-use fee for talk, text or data as long as you stay within your domestic plan’s limits.
Related: AT&T follows Verizon, T-Mobile to more free roaming
According to CNNMoney, Verizon customers are likely to get 3G or 4G speeds when they’re in foreign countries- compared to the slower 2G speeds from T-Mobile, which has made a lot of noise recently about its new “free” international roaming plans.
An analysis by Forbes says that evaluating whether TravelPass is a good deal depends on how much you’ll use your phone while abroad. Buying a local SIM card could be a much better option, Forbes notes, and Verizon’s CDMA phones might not work on the GSM networks that are common in other countries.
Click here to see where TravelPass works
How do you use your phone when overseas? Which carrier do you use and how do you avoid spending too much? Please leave your tips below…
It looks like Japan is not covered under this plan. When traveling to Japan, renting a phone and WiFi hot spot are fairly inexpensive, courtesy of the ongoing price wars.
Yes, buying a SIMM card in Europe can be a much better deal. I paid $28 for a SIMM card last month in Germany, and they gave me two extras, so I did all my calling and data use for three weeks and still have an unused SIMM card left over.
Agreed, Sal! We Verizon people can thank T-Mobile for this one!
You can tell that competition has forced this onto Verizon. If you travel regularly to Europe you aren’t using your own phone, but taking an old phone and getting a chip put into it in Europe. For me it’s dirt cheap, on my phone I put 10 pounds onto it in England and use a special service that changes are two cents a minute. You can get all of this through the 3 network.
I have sprint and was surprise how good the data service was, not for doing internet work, but for getting emails and simple stuff and messaging it’s great.
Yes funny how Verizon and AT&T get off their tushes when they have serious competition.
Does Verizon have an 800MB plan for travel outside North America? I’ve never seen that
sounds like a great program. $10 per day is about what I end up paying on the current international plans where you buy 800MB + a discounted rate on calls. But this is simpler and easier to understand and manage
I thought the details were actually quite clear. You obviously got a bad agent, it happens. I find it’s much better to read the fineprint on the website rather than call an agent and hope that they did their homework
But there’s a huge drawback that you conveniently forgot to mention: you don’t get to keep your number. Quite a hassle making sure all your friends and contacts update your contact info at the start of your trip (especially since you won’t know your new number until you arrive in the foreign country). Then you’ve got to make sure all your friends and contacts update your number again when you return.
T-Mobile’s international access isn’t 2G/EDGE in every country. They only guarantee that as a minimum, but in many countries (e.g. in Europe where its parent company resides), you will be able to connect to HSPA+ or LTE. Also, in Canada & Mexico, you get full LTE where available. In the Asian countries I’ve visited, the data speeds were too slow for my liking, but prepaid local SIM cards are so cheap there that it’s no big deal. Either way, this Verizon plan is not competitive.
This is not a good deal! All Verizon phones are unlocked now. Just get a local Vodafone sim in most european countries. You may pay 15 euro initial cost but then it is 3e a day for 500mb, 20min, 50 txt roaming in any country in Europe. It is called smart passport and it works in LTE speeds.
Thanks for the info, M! I use Verizon, too, and updated my account via the links here in this post… it was a little vague, but I figured it out. Looking forward to trying this out on my next trip to Canada and UK.
Thank you for posting this great info. I happen to be going to Paris in a couple of weeks and already have Verizon so this is very helpful for me. However, I want to caution everyone that this is so new that Verizon has not updated all of its info online about this. Also, the rep I spoke to at Verizon told me that if you use the service one day in France, then do not use it for a day or 2, that you then have to call Verizon to reactivate it. Upon pressing the rep, he admitted he didn’t know if that was true and that they haven’t even given everyone all of the correct info yet.
He also told me that if we were to go to another country for a day trip (I used the UK as an example) that I would be charged $10 twice that day for using it in 2 different countries on the same day. I have no idea if this is true or not.
He also had difficulty activating 2 of the lines on my account for this service.
Finally he kept pushing me to sign up for their old plan which only allows a small amount of Data, even though I told him repeatedly I did not want that plan because it is not enough data. And YES! I want to use data while I am out and about for a variety of business and personal reasons.
So my advice would be to be careful if you are using this for the first time in the next few days. If this is really as difficult to use as the rep made it sound, I may well get a TMobile SIM as I have done in the past