Calling U.K from U.S

[SteveDonovan]

I came across some details of Phone Cards that can be purchased in the U.S that claim much reduced costs of calling the U.K. One site I was looking at if I have got it right costs $20 prepay and for that you get 500mins. Can that be right or have I got something very wrong? Others experiences of these pre pay cards would be much appreciated.

[blott]

From my experience with phone cards in the US, watch out for the connection charges. One I got had a low per minute rate but had a 79 cent connection charge so each call cost about $1 and the card was quickly used up with the connection charge and not much with any call minutes!

[florida4sun]

No doubt it would be 500 ins local calling. International will use more per minute. Then you will get a surcharge per call. I would check to see what phone system the house has that your staying it. Some of them are reasonable and some very expensive.
Trouble with phone cards is you have dial in a long string of numbers each time you want to make a call.

quote:Originally posted by SteveDonovan

I came across some details of Phone Cards that can be purchased in the U.S that claim much reduced costs of calling the U.K. One site I was looking at if I have got it right costs $20 prepay and for that you get 500mins. Can that be right or have I got something very wrong? Others experiences of these pre pay cards would be much appreciated.

[Biggus]

Steve,
We got an AT&T prepaid card from the UK (when we got our money changed in American Express BdC) before we went out to Florida, after the card problems we had the last time we went out. We bought £20 and a £10 cards, made numerous phone calls to the UK throughout the holiday from the villa and never even touched the £20 card!! Seemed very good value. As it is my wife is off to Denver in a couple of weeks and is taking the £20 card with her to use. Would not hesitate to use them again. It seemed that the UK calls were almost treated as local calls whereas the calls to the USA were more expensive.
Hope that is of some help.

[mikewj]

We've had cards bought in the UK and the US and they don't seem to be very different in terms of the cost/time.

One thing to consider is that if you dial from a payphone, you generally have an additional surcharge applied to your card, whereas you just get charged for the minutes you use when dialling from a hotel room/villa.

Walmart do reasonabley priced cards and are priced in terms of the number of minutes available. However, the time limits are based on internal US calls, but I seem to remember that they give a general explanation of the equivalent number of international minutes.

[Biggus]

Mike,
We saw the prepaid calling cards in Wal-Mart - they were the US$ version of the cards we had in £'s, guess it is swings and roundabouts, 6 of one and 1/2 dozen of the other etc etc. We found some of the pre-paid cards that we bought at the 'gift' stores vending machines a little hit and miss last time round so thought that we would play safe this time and buy them in the UK - they were excellent.

[Malcolm]

I've been using a Winn Dixie phone card for years now. It's rechargeable. Generally the AT&T (like Walmart and Winn Dixie)cards give you half the number of stated minutes for calls to the UK. Therefore the 500 minute card will give you 250 minutes of calls to the UK and so on.

Hope that made sense. I couldn't understand it myself!