Hire of Walkie Talkies / Cellphones

[John J]

I am going to WDW in a few days with my pregnant wife, my daughter and some friends.

As my wife will be unable to go on a lot of rides, I would like to be able to keep in contact with her so that she do other things while I am waiting in line. I understand the best way of doing this is by walkie talkies (I have gathered from other threads that 38 sub-code walkie talkies are the best), or by cellphone.

I live in the UK and my cellphone does not work in the US.

Does anyone know if walkie talkies or Cellphones can be hired for the duration of my vacation once I get to the US? If so, where can I get them from and how much do they cost?

(By the way - she was not pregnant when the holiday was booked!)

[Coldpony]

You can rent cell phones from most car rental companies. Not sure how much though.

[BuzzLightYear3]

When we were at Disney last June, we lost one of our Walkie Talkies. It was a reasonably good model that had 38 sub-channels but wasn't anything that had an extremely long range. E.G....it worked fine within a park, but certainly didn't have Orlando-wide coverage. I called around to see if I could rent some somewhere....Disney doesn't rent them, but I did find several local agencies that did rent them. I don't remember what the prices were any more, but I do remember that the price of renting a pair for our remaining 5 days was almost as much (e.g. within $10-$20) of buying a new set, so my husband ran out to Best Buy and bought a pair for around $70. (That was about $30 less than we had paid for them 6 months earlier; I bet they're even cheaper now.) That gave us a 3rd Walkie Talkie which was nice since my In-Laws were also with us on that trip.....at least it was nice until my Father In Law lost the extra one. (What's that saying about how the "Apple doesn't fall far from the tree? :D) The rental agencies (which I found in the Orlando Yellow Pages) also had options with much longer ranges (e.g. city wide), but of course those were more expensive. Net whether you want to rent or not probably depends on how sophisticated of a walkie talkie you want which would probably depend on how far apart you expect to be. One thing that did seem nice about the rental agencies is from what I recall, they were all more than willing to bring the rented walkie talkies right to our room for us! (I didn't pursue it long enough to see if there was a hidden charge for that.)

Have a great trip!