Today’s teenagers travelling abroad have many more tools available than the backpacking generations that came before. Countless apps can keep them from getting lost, getting on the wrong train or saying the wrong thing in foreign language. Parents rest a little easier when their young adult children wander off into the wilderness. Before you send them off on teen tours in the wild blue, make sure they have the tools they need.

Mobile Phone Travel Basics

It starts with checking on your phone’s service plan. Some plans charge per kilobyte and will run up a bill into the tens of thousands if you do not configure your plan for international use. When you ask your phone provider about their options, read the fine print.

AT&T’s International Calling Plan only includes some countries and caps you at 20MB of data use. Most pictures and videos are at least 2MB, so you would run through that very quickly if you were depending on your apps abroad. To safeguard yourself against piling on obscene fees, ask a rep to give you the steps you need to shut off your network service on your device and only access your email from hotel or café internet services. You can use all your apps and make Skype phone calls through whatever Wi-Fi is available. You can easily reconnect to your network whenever you would like. [Read more...]