longterm

Good point! Speaking clear English would be a bonus; I'm very forgiving when people speak English with strong accents, but when I had to ask 3 times what the guy was saying, it led to a less-than-satisfying interaction. I'll say this though: when I've called AT&T or T-Mobile (who we just switched to), I've always gotten someone on the line fairly quickly. Same with Southwest, although it's rare that I've ever had to call them.

That's good to know; we actually have a couple of legs on Lufthansa--going out to Brussels, then on the way back from Frankfurt to Dallas. I like to use Travelocity because I find some good deals there, but when I selected these flights, it actually gave the airline as United, but because they're part of the One Way consortium, that includes all sorts of airlines--including, for this trip, Lufthansa, Brussels Airlines, and Air Dolomiti (who I suspect is the culprit in this situation).

Fortunately, our flight over seems to be intact, and if we do end up having to fly home a day later, we'll just make the best of it and enjoy Florence for an extra day. Doesn't seem so bad when I think about it... 🙂 But not liking United before this incident, I've now resolved never to fly with them if I can help it. Of course, on our upcoming Viking river cruise in October, I have no doubt that we'll be put on... United.

Our favorite is Southwest; while I'm sure we'll eventually have a snafu with them, we've not experienced it yet. This is the first time I've ever had a reservation on a flight, and then it just simply disappeared. I even had the confirmation numbers, and the Air Dolomiti (the airline that United booked us on) rep told me that he could see our reservation, but that we were no longer on the flight. Not sure who to blame for this, but since United is who we booked with, and since they are the only ones who can resolve this, I place the blame squarely on them. At the very least they should give us a seat upgrade, but I don't see that happening.

We're headed to Italy on Saturday for a Rick Steves Best of Tuscany tour; I booked flights months ago. Our return was from Florence to Frankfurt, from Frankfurt to Dallas; I had confirmation codes, was set to go, but hadn't been able to get seat assignments for the 1st leg, from Florence to Frankfurt, which was with Air Dolomiti, but booked by United. I called this morning, after trying last week, and was told that we had reservations on the flight, but didn't any longer. They told me to call United, which I did; after wasting an hour on hold with a rep, I was told that although the flight was now full, she was going to "email Air Dolomiti and ask to have our reservation reinstated," and that she would be calling me tomorrow. She also said that we might just have to fly home the next day. I'm sure hotel and food compensation would have been forthcoming (NOT). This is the worst sort of service; we will do everything we can to never fly this awful airline ever again. While I do understand that accidents happen, I should have gotten resolution this morning, and if they really cared about their customers, offered some sort of compensation for this unacceptable situation.

I would guess not; we didn't have travel insurance for that cruise. At any rate, insurance policies are totally separate from Viking cruises, so you'd have to ask your insurance carrier. We don't use TripMate (we found a much better company) so if this were to come up, I'd ask them, but I would assume that a travel policy is NOT going to transfer if we decided to defer a trip.

That's pretty pricey though; for $24 for 30 days using an Airalo eSIM, I can get 10GB of data, which would probably suffice for me. I don't expect to have to do any intl. calls though, so that's not really something I need. We just switched from AT&T to T-Mobile, with a monthly savings of about $100; T-Mobile provides free data & texting overseas, so even though the data throttles down after 5GB, it'll suffice for the daily tasks I have to perform on my servers in Atlanta. I haven't looked yet to see if T-Mobile has a daily international rate like Verizon and AT&T do ($10/day if you make any overseas calls or use their cell service in any way, maxes out at $100/month). Actually, as I type that, I see that's a better offer than the Google plan, since it maxes at $100, and would allow for unlimited calls for a max of $100--plus data and texting. But moving to T-Mobile was a good move--they paid off mine and my wife's phones (a max of $800 on each), plus the monthly cost is much lower.

If Verizon does it like AT&T, their international plan ($10/day) kicks in automatically every day that you use your phone. The max is $100 for a month, I think, but you may want to confirm that. If you don't use your phone's cellular in a day, you're not charged that day; if you text, and are not on wifi, that'll count as a $10 day.

You'd want to add an eSIM if you want to be able to email & text overseas while not onboard the ship. I've tested Airalo, but there are other eSIM providers as well; Airalo has good reviews and in my testing it worked really well, fairly easy to set up--it walks you through the process, which takes about 5 minutes.

Actually, I haven't used Airalo in a foreign country yet; I tested it here for our upcoming trip to Tuscany in 3 weeks, but now that we have T-Mobile, I don't think we'll need it. I saw the Rewards benefit thing last night, but I'm not comfortable with letting a service monitor my debit card usage--which is what they do. They also send "targeted ads," which means they'd be flooding me with unwanted advertising... so I deleted the app. 🙂

OK, my wife and I made the switch from AT&T to T-Mobile. Our experience wasn't without some frustration, but we got it done. We paid off both phones so that we could get them unlocked; that was required before we could proceed. The 1st rep told me she was sending me SIMs for our 2 iPhones; only after she shipped them did I realize that my iPhone 14 Pro, and my wife's 12 Pro, don't HAVE physical SIMs or a SIM tray--so this was unnecessary, and caused us to wait days, only to throw the SIMs in the trash when they arrived. The first phone didn't take the eSIM properly, and after the 3rd or 4th person I dealt with (either by phone or chatting on their online chat), I was told that the only way to fix it was to go into a local store. This turned out to be untrue, but that was only one of several mistakes made by T-Mobile reps. We finally deleted the eSIM that never fully activated and redid the process--which I could have done at home, and it worked fine. The 2nd switchover went flawlessly in about 5 minutes. At any rate, we now have international data and texting; data speed will throttle down after 5GB. Since I do a lot of data transfers when connecting to my 25 servers in Atlanta, I'll probably burn through the 5GB fairly quickly, but if I have to, I can always buy an Airalo eSIM if I want to. But the best thing is that we were spending almost $200/month for our 2 phone plans, without the installment charges for our 2 phones. Now we're paying $100/month for both phones, and get Netflix & AppleTV+ for free as well. Such a deal!

Go5G 55 includes Netflix and Apple TV+; I’ll be adding my Apple Watch as well for $10/month, and will get a $150 rebate when I do.

From comparing the two plans, they are similar but not identical; Go5G gives you 50GB data, then throttles down; Magenta gives you 40. In Mexico Go5G gives 15GB of data, Magenta only 5. Since we go to Cancun every year, we will stick with that Go5G plan.

I’ll do that!

Well I selected a different plan, but now I’m wondering what the difference is. i won’t get the new SIMs until Monday or Tuesday so I have some time to investigate.

You can convert your SIM to an eSIM, but it’s still connected to your current provider. If you want to get cheap service overseas, and don’t have T-Mobile, you’ll want to get an additional eSIM.

We went ahead and made the switch; I just finished with T-Mobile, and they'll be sending a couple of SIMs for our existing phones (which we can use with T-Mobile). I'll get up to $800 to pay off my iPhone 14 Pro, so that's really good; plus, they'll give me $150 if I transfer my Apple Watch as well, which I'll do--cell service for it is only $10/month. Total cost is $100/month for 2 phones, then an additional $10 when I move the watch over next week. They send out physical SIMs, then once I've installed them, I change over to eSIMs. This looks to be at least $50/month cheaper than our current AT&T plans, plus we get intl. data and texting, which will be handy. I also like that we can make intl. calls if we need to, for only 25 cents a minute.

We're thinking about it; I'm probably going to get an iPhone 15 Pro Max for the periscope camera, which will [reportedly] go up to 6x optical zoom, which equates to 210mm on a standard physical 35mm zoom lens. Now that we're in our late-late-late 30s, we could get their old-people plan and spend a lot less, but having been with AT&T since 2007, I'm hesitant to make the leap. Any misgivings at all for you?

Yes, download Airalo (or one of the other eSIM apps, but I recommend Airalo), and purchase the European plan that suits your needs. If you do use up the available data, you can always top it off with more data, for very little money. We're headed to Tuscany in about 4 weeks and I'll be buying an Airalo eSIM for Italy; on our next trip (Viking British Isles Explorer and a 2-week Rick Steves in Scotland), I'll buy the European eSIM, which will cover the UK and Norway, but apparently will not work in the Shetland Islands or Orkney Islands (probably don't have the cell providers that the eSIM uses).

There are flash devices that can be used for backing up iPhones; I see one at Best Buy, for example, and I'm sure there are tons of other options. Rumor has it that Apple will move to USB-C in September with the iPhone 15, which means any flash drive will work, even if it's a USB, with just a simple USB to USB-C adapter.

We took advantage of one of these offers a couple of years ago; we went from a 5-day cruise in a standard DV cabin to a penthouse junior suite, 11-day cruise, and $1500 in cash. A very sweet deal!

I've had really great success with the company I used; this will be our 3rd booking with them, and given all the bits and pieces that go into one of these trips, we've been extremely impressed with them all along the way. First 2 trips were to Zimbabwe and South Africa, including Cape Town; this next one will be up in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda.

I'm with you; we book our own Viking cruises, then I transfer it to our TA for the OBC and very little else. I have a travel insurance company that I prefer, so I do that myself as well. On an upcoming safari trip to Africa however, we will use the same excellent company we've used twice in the past (Great Safaris), because these trips are much more complex than anything I would want to take on myself, considering we will be hopping from place to place on small planes, going into some rather remote areas. But for a cruise or a European trip? Pretty easy to navigate IMO.

Rather than doing that, buy a regional eSIM instead; if you're going to be in Europe, buy the eSIM for 39 European countries. It's not very expensive, and will allow you to travel all over Europe using the one eSIM. When you go to select the eSIM, look for the tab at the top that says REGIONAL ESIMS.

I just found this information on CC about the condition of the North Sea in July: "The best time for a North Sea cruise is at the height of summer, during the months of July and August, for calmer waters and fantastic, sunny weather." Good news; we really want to see the Orkney and Shetland Islands. I just added a Roll Call for the July 4, 2024 sailing.