I am planning on using a phone card from Cancun but am slightly confused as to where I can use it. Last time in Mexico (Ixtapa), I made the mistake of calling collect from the hotel room. That resulted in a $65 charges for 5 minutes. Can I use a calling card from the Hotel room or will they still punish me on charges? I have read some comments that the phone cards won't work from the hotel room. Anyone have any advice or comments? FYI, I am staying at the Gran Caribe Real if that matters... Thanks! Mike
I would suggest using cancunvalet.com, there link is below. You can rent a cell phone for your trip, pretty cheap, I did this and saved loads of money!
I dunno. I figure as long as you're using a hotel phone, the hotel will charge some kind of fee regardless whether your call is local, collect, or via calling card. Perhaps you should use one of the public phones that seem to be in the lobbies of most hotels/resorts? Just like bank fees, some of those resorts will always find some way to help you part with more of your cash.
When we went there last year we used our calling card from our room. The hotel charged us a $5 connection fee, but then we just used the minutes from our card.
Well, here's the cheap way of doing it. I don't make any calls from my room. I instruct the people here in the US to reject a collect call from me. Since they know where I'm staying they call me back 15 mins after they reject the call. B4 I leave the states I buy 20 bucks worth of calling cards here in the states and some of this cards are even good in mexico. Heck, the last few $5 cards I got gave me 17 hs calling time. Of course they are only good for a few short calls unless I want to spend my vacation on the phone, but after coming back I still had 2 out of the 4 I bought to keep in touch. You can always ask your folks to call you at a certain time when you know you'll be in your room, or send them an email or a text msg from your cell. That not always works, since my folks usually called when was at the pub or passed out, but they leave a msg stating a time of the next call (which is usually at ungodly hours....around noon), but it's worth the try. Have a great vacation.
There's really 2 types of phone calls to consider - calls to back home and calls to places in Cancun and other parts of Mexico. If you don't mind spending 70 cents per minute and you've budgeted $45 or more for phone conversation for the week, Cancunvalet is the best deal going. I'd say that these are very reasonable numbers for a last minute solution - the only problem I have with it is that phone rental will cost you setup and daily rental fees even if you don't use it. If you've got some time and want/need a less expensive solution there's a 2-prong approach you can use to lower that bill even further. For calling back home only - use a virtual phone card with a (0)1 800 access number for Mexico. I would never recommend calling from a payphone other than in an emergengy as there are serious health risks to using public phones and there's almost always a 50-cent or more surcharge to use your calling card from a public phone. (0)1 800 numbers are, however, ususally considered 'local' by hotels and ususally cost only 50 cent flat fee to make (same as the calling card public phone surcharge). Calling cards will then only cost about 17 additional cents per minute to the US, but many round your usage to the next highest 4 or 5-minute interval, which may also raise the cost. If you find it useful to make local calls in Cancun (I do!), take along an unlocked T-mobile or Cingular phone and buy a SIM for it to make my local calls at 37 cents per minute (no surcharges). The first time I did that I bought my SIM at a telcel store downtown and it cost me $11 and it took 72 hours before I could get my messages, but now I just buy the refill cards (airtime only) and it works when I hit the ground with no further costs or delays. (You can occasionally find the SIM cards on ebay which should eliminate the wait.) Hope that helps.
