Staying Connected On The Road and A Giveaway!

Keeping mobile phone bills down whilst on the road can be a bit of a nightmare.

Imagine the situation – you’ve arrived at your destination and have diligently printed out the address of the hostel you’re staying at and some written directions.  You start walking, only to discover that those directions are not quite as helpful as you’d hoped they would be.  In fact they’re useless, and you try to blame your boyfriend for this, who in turn tries to blame you.

The road you’re currently standing on is not marked on Lonely Planet‘s map of the area, there are no cafes nearby (and therefore no wifi), no sign of any taxis, and you don’t speak enough of the language in order to ask for assistance.

How do you find your way to your hostel without either,

1. wandering aimlessly around the town or city in the hope that you’ll stumble upon a cafe that has wifi, or manage to locate and flag down a taxi? or
2. gulping, turning on your data roaming (in order to load Google Maps) and sucking up whatever charges appear on your bill at the end of the month?

The answer is you don’t.

When you do eventually arrive at your hostel, you eagerly punch in the wifi code and wait…

And wait…

In between “connecting….” and “saved, secured”, you’re ready to throw the phone out the window or scream and shout at the hostel staff, who don’t know what to do other than continually reset the router.

If you do manage to connect to the hostel’s wifi network, you’ll often find that web pages take forever to load – or refuse to altogether.  And if that’s the case you can forget about uploading that photo you just shot of that beautiful church along the way.

And then of course there’s the text message you need to send to your parents to let them know you’ve arrived ok, and that phone call you need to make to your bank because you forgot to tell them you were travelling abroad and they’ve blocked your card due to suspected fraudulent activity.

Paying roaming fees when you’re abroad sucks, whether you’re trying to upload a new blog post on your travels, tweet about an amazing experience you just had, share a photo to Instagram, or simply keep in contact with loved ones back home.

The good news is that if you’re a UK resident, Three may just have the solution.  The mobile phone company is looking to make it right for their customers with their Feel At Home Network.

Three’s #makeitright campaign aims change all that is wrong with the mobile industry, and high roaming charges are one of the main issues they have identified.  By abolishing roaming charges completely when their customers travel to any one of the eighteen destinations currently in the Feel At Home Network, Three is helping frequent travellers to potentially save thousands of pounds on their mobile phone bills.

Countries currently in the Feel At Home Network

If you have a rough idea of the quantity of data, messaging and voice calls that you tend to use whilst away, you can use their price comparison tool to work out how much you’d save.

I chose somewhere fairly close to home (Spain) on the basis that it’s probably one of the cheaper countries to ‘roam’ in, selected a quick 10-minute phone call to my parents, just 10 necessary text messages and only 500MB of data and already I’ll save almost £100 on Three’s Feel At Home Network.

Change that to somewhere a little more exotic with heavy internet usage and a few more texts and calls, and the savings are immense!

To mark the launch of Three’s new #makeitright campaign, they’re giving away a £50 airline voucher (to use on an airline of your choice) as well as a pre-paid Three sim card (loaded with £10 credit). 

All you have to do to enter is leave a blog post comment below telling me all about your best tips and tricks for blogging and sharing experiences with friends and family whilst on the go.  To get you started here’s a couple of mine:

• I write all my blog posts in Pages (An Apple App that doesn’t require internet connection but you can still format text much like you can in MS Word) and then copy and past to WordPress when I have internet connection.
• I always pack a portable mobile phone charger, so that if I’m away from an electrical outlet for an extended period of time, I’ve always got charge.  What prompted the purchase of this was my 4-day Inca Trail trek.  Having the portable charger would have meant that I was always connected, should I have needed to answer a phone call or send a text or share that photo of me at the top of Dead Woman’s Pass.

So what are you waiting for? 🙂

N.B The competition closes at midnight on 1 October 2015, and the winner will be chosen by Three and subsequently notified.  Only UK residents only can enter.  Sorry to all my US readers, hopefully I’ll be able to open up the next giveaway to you guys too!

If for any reason you have trouble leaving a blog post comment using Rafflecopter, you can leave one in the comments box at the bottom of this post.  Just don’t forget to un-tick the ‘comment luv’ box if you’re not a blogger and don’t have a website.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

**This competition is run in conjunction with Three Mobile, but all content and opinions are my own**