International Cell Phone Roaming Charges

For all of my international vacations prior to my recent honeymoon, I have spent over a $1,000 in roaming charges.  My last vacation to Mexico, included roaming charges of $17/day to receive and make phone calls and texts. This hurts when you add it to the already high cell phone bills for regular service compared to so many other countries.

Let me introduce you to Wi-Fi calling. When I travelled to Greece I took two phones with me. My current I-Phone 13 and an older Android. Upon arriving in Greece I bought a SIM card with unlimited data and put that SIM card in the Android phone.

I then turned that Android phone into a private hotspot and connected my I-phone to it through Wi-Fi. My I-phone was set to "Airplane Mode" so I would not incur any roaming charges. The I-phone was also set to "Wi-Fi Calling". This meant I would receive any regular calls or texts made to me, and I could  also send texts and make calls back to Canada without any roaming charges.

This saved me the $17/day in Rogers Roaming Charges. Now, I did have to carry these two phones with me when I was out and about, but using my cell phone camera to take pictures I was going to have the phone with me anyway. There is probably a technical way to have used an ESIM but that was a little above my techy comfort level.

So happy not to have to contribute more to Rogers' profits than I have to with this new feature called "Wi-Fi Calling" and the calls were as clear at I would have experienced on roaming for a fraction of the price!