Top 6 Ways to Stay in Touch During Study Abroad

Before you study abroad, take the time to figure out how you will keep in touch with friends and relatives back home, and in your host country as well. If your cell phone and cell phone carrier offer international service to your host country for reasonable rates, great! But if not, don’t despair. There are options out there! 

1. Cell phone: A great option is the Mobal GSM World Phone. They are fairly inexpensive to buy, require no contract, you pay only when you use them, you keep the same phone number whenever you travel, and work in 150 countries worldwide. Read an article about this great phone here: Keeping In Touch While Studying Abroad

2. Phone card: AmeriSpan has an international phone card with special low rates, access to over 150 countries, and your friends and family can even messages for you. 

3. International country codes: Participants & their families should know how to dial internationally. Country Calling Codes is a website that includes all country calling codes, and instructions. 

4. ATT USA Direct: A service where you dial a code in the foreign country and then dial the USA to save on the rates of calls. They even work with cell phones. ATT allows you to use the calling card and credit cards. Click for country access numbers and other information 

5. Skype: Skype is a free and/or cheap way to make phone calls, chat, text, and even video calls. Skype to Skype calls are free, and you can download it for free at Skype's website. To make calls or texts to a non-skype cell phone or land line, you can either use a pay-as-you-go plan or a monthly plan. It’s a great way to keep in touch while overseas, and all you need is an Internet connection and a headset. To make a call, you can enter a phone number, search for a business or person, or go to your contacts list. They even make importing contacts from your email easy! AmeriSpan has a system set up where we don’t have to be logged into Skype for the calls to come through, they simply forward to our main phone line.

6. Internet: Find out prior to your trip about Internet access. Is it available at the school? Most likely. Is it available at your homestay? Maybe not. A good source for Internet while abroad is in Internet cafes in town. A laptop will make this much more accessible.  

Contacting AmeriSpan while Studying Abroad: 

• Email at info@amerispan.com
• Skype to ‘amerispan’ (note: if we are offline with skype the call automatically forwards to our main switchboard)
• Live chat service at our main AmeriSpan web site, from our Facebook welcome page, or click on the Live Help icon on the top left corner of this page.
• We are in the office from 09:00 am to 19:00 pm Eastern Time from Mon-Fri 
• You may also call us at +1-215-751-1100
• Emergency message service: During an emergency if your family can’t contact you, they may call us 24 hours/day, dictate the message and we will relay the message to you. Conversely, if you cannot reach your family and it is an emergency, call us collect from anywhere and we will relay the message.

Click for more of AmeriSpan's Travel Resources

Want more predeparture tips and advice? Download our free e-report, AmeriSpan's Guide to Predeparture