Phone Calls Home

[Dano1182]

Waht is the best way to call home from DVC.
Last year the charges were very high.
Any Suggestions??

 

[Richyams]

Phone card, you only dial the 1-800 number listed on the card, $0.35.

Cell phone, the roaming charges may be high, but its that first network charge that kills you using the phone for long distance in the room.

 

[ncligs]

Cell phone with no roaming or long distance charges.Plus we have a personal 1-800 number that rings at our house and is only 10 cents a minute, with no monthly fee. All toll free calls from a DVC resort are "Free".

 

[wheeler]

I'm going to be using pre-paid phone cards for the first time this year....... I just can *NOT* believe how much they charge when you call from the hotel room. Never AGAIN! Are the calling cards all the same? Can you get them anywhere?

 

[Ralph&Pam]

After paying about $1 per minute to call home from WDW on a trip last year, we switched to using a pre-paid calling card.

Calling cards are not all the same, with rates ranging from less to 10 cents per minute (sometimes much less) to 2 or 3 times that. We use a calling card we buy at the local Walgreens. It costs about 10 cents per minute and uses the AT&T network. I have also seen MCI calling cards for about this same rate. I have seen reports of less expensive calling cards from Sam's Club, but we are not Sam's Club members and the time and hassle to drive to the nearest Sam's Club is more than I care to fool with.

Using a calling card from the room is easy and is either 35 cents or free for DVC members (for our last trip, we were charged 35 cents for one call and made three others for which we were not charged). Dial the 1-800 access code as a local call and proceed according to the directions on the card.

We do not use our cell phones because we have the bare minimum calling plan on both our cell phones, so we pay a high per minute rate for every call plus roaming charges for long distance. Other plans may eliminate this problem. Our DS's cell phone plan includes nationwide long distance with no roaming charges. Of course his base monthly bill is about 3x mine.

Ralph

 

[erick10520]

I bought a Sprint PCS phone with nationwide long distance, works fine from WDW to home....

 

[DVC-Don]

Same here. Cell phone with a nationwide long distance plan. We even use the cell phones at home for long distance calls. Hardly ever pay for long distance.

 

[Caskbill]

We always use the cell phone for ALL long distance calls. In fact we have discontinued all long distance service on our home phone, so if we try to dial out long distance, we get a recording instead. (800 numbers still work OK though).

If it wern't for the modem connection to the internet, I'd get rid of the home phone completely. We travel a lot, weeks and months at a time. I hate paying for that home phone line while we're not there. That's one reason I like DirectTV over cable. When we're gone we just call and they shut off service, then turn it back on when we return. Wish the phone company would do that.

As for calling cards, when you purchase them, be sure to check for any expiration dates they have. If you purchase a 100 minute card that expires in a year, and then only use 50 minutes of it during that year, then remember you've actually paid double the minute rate considering what you actually used.

 

[EllenJ]

I have used both. If you belong to Sam's or Costco, you can get phone cards for as little as 3.2 cents per minute. You can't beat that (unless you have a cell phone with no roaming or no long distance).
I will probably us a combonation of both this next trip.