Best travel phone plans in August: how to choose and what to look for
While T-Mobile has long included slow-speed international data in its plans, AT&T and Verizon largely haven’t. For most plans, adding the feature costs extra. The good news is that both have gotten much better about roaming rates, and depending on your trip, it might make sense to do this instead of going through the process of unlocking, finding a local SIM, and playing that game (more on that in a moment).
In the past, roaming was charged on a per-megabyte or per-gigabyte-used basis, which could quickly add up to bills of hundreds of dollars (or more). Today, both Verizon and AT&T give you the option of roaming with unlimited talk, text, and high-speed data for $10 per day on many of their respective unlimited plans.
If you travel on a family plan, AT&T will only charge you that $10 per line, while other members pay $5 per day — and it will only charge you for 10 days, per line, per billing cycle. So if you have one line with AT&T and travel for two weeks, you could end up paying just $100 instead of $140 for international roaming (though if your AT&T bill resets during that time, you will be liable for those days, as the clock starts each billing cycle).
Verizon doesn’t cap the number of days it will charge you, but it does offer a few different options. One of them is the TravelPass advantage, something that is offered as part of the latest unlimited plans. It lets you get three days of international roaming for $10 a month. If you don’t use those days, you can roll them over (and save 36 of them). You can add it the same way for the month you’re traveling, save a little bit there, and then remove the benefit for all the other months you wouldn’t use it.
Verizon also offers a $100 monthly subscription option which gives you unlimited texts and data, plus 250 minutes for traditional calling (as opposed to using a messaging app like WhatsApp or FaceTime). Of the data, 20GB will be at “high speed” and the rest at “3G speeds”. Note that with this plan, you will have to manually delete it, otherwise you risk it becoming a recurring charge on your bill each month.
T-Mobile similarly offers the ability to purchase “international passes” for high-speed data. It has a few options here, including a Option for 15 GB of high-speed data (usable “up to 30 days”) for $50 per month.
