Mobile phone

A quick look at the Verizon website will answer your question, I think - $12/day is the Travel Pass option, you get charged each day you actually use it. You can turn off cell service to avoid that. Just use wifi when it's available, turn cellular back on as needed. Another choice is the monthly international plan, which I think is maybe $125 now - you get a month of calls, text, data, but check the site for details. Another option is to upgrade your plan to include international. Another option is an esim - again, you can use the search bar above, there are lots of entries with info...

buy a SIM card when you get to England, they sell them right at the airport.

buy a SIM card when you get to England, they sell them right at the airport.

Lebara and Lyca are probably the cheapest SIMs for international voice calls. That's the best way to do it if you don't need incoming calls, or can send your temporary number to people who may need to call you.

If your phone is unlocked, and will accept esim's, you could get an esim from Roamless. It's Pay-as-you-go, which means you make an account, give them $10 or $20, and you get data for about $2/gb. The nice thing is that your balance never expires, and works in 200+ countries. So next year you can go to Germany, and you're all set.

As for the phone calls, Roamless give you an option of making internatioal calls by using their app. The calls cost something like 2 cents per minute, I think. Only problem is that you can't receive calls. You can give them your actual phone number and then your outgoing calls appear to be coming from your normal home number. Just be sure folks do not try to return the call to your home number.

I've used Roamless in Switzerland, Germany, Ireland, and GB, works fine. I learned about it on this fine forum. I'm using it right now for internet as I'm at a big airshow in Wisconsin, and the local Tmobile towers are so swamped with literally 50,000 attendees, that using Roamless with AT&T towers works better. I have a tablet with a Roamless esim, so I make the tablet a wifi hotspot, and connect my laptop to it.

I should have added that if your phone is unlocked, you can buy a sim card or esim from one of many providers to get data, and then make calls and texts using an app like Google Voice (Android), Whatsapp, or quite a few others.

One disadvantage would be that your calls would be coming from a phone number your family doesn't recognize. And also such voice calls consume some data, so the cost per minute would be more than a few pennies per minute (but free if you use hotel wifi).

Lots of threads on this forum about favorite sim or esim providers, Airalo, Holafly, BCengi, GiffGaff, and Three. The last two are British networks, and can easily be bought when you arrive in GB.

I recommend gift-gaff.
I’ve used them twice in the UK with no problems.

"One disadvantage would be that your calls would be coming from a phone number your family doesn't recognize."

If the OP uses WhatsApp, it will display their own (home) number. All they need to do is download and create a whatsapp account while they have their home SIM in (ie before they leave, in this case as they won't be using roaming). After that it doesn't matter what SIM you have. I'm traveling at the moment with a different SIM, and my whatsapp still displays my Singapore number.

I usually wait until I have wifi to make calls. I then use Google Voice. Very cheap and no charge except for the call. (I think 2 cents/minute)

I'm guessing my phone number shows up as when I call businesses that "recognize" my phone number, they know it's me.

If you did go for a UK SIM, as an example, I've been on Lebara for the last year or so. I pay £7 per month for 30GB of data and unlimited UK calls and texts. There's 100 minutes of free international calls, 5p (£0.05) per minute to the US after that.

I was paying £2 per month for the first three months I was on Lebara. I found that deal through USwitch, but you can find Lebara SIMs at any convenience store etc. I believe you can "convert" it to an eSIM through their app once you have the physical SIM. I pay monthly automatically from my PayPal account.

https://www.uswitch.com/mobiles/compare/sim_only_deals/

https://www.lebara.co.uk/en/best-sim-only-deals.html

All they need to do is download and create a whatsapp account while they have their home SIM

There's one more step - every person they want to call also has to have a WhatsApp account.

"every person they want to call also has to have a WhatsApp account."

True, although I haven't come across anyone I've added to my contacts in recent years who doesn't
My clients have it, friends have it, my parents have it...

Just turn your mobile data off and use Messenger or Whatsapp to call your contacts whenever you have WiFi.
WiFi is available in many places, pubs, coffee shops, fast food places, restaurants, some shops.

All they need to do is download and create a whatsapp account while they have their home SIM
There's one more step - every person they want to call also has to have a WhatsApp account.

One more thing. Whatsapp requires you to give the app complete access to your whole contacts list. I really don't trust A billion dollar internet business to have access to all my friend's emails.

I checked my account and it does not get access to my contact list.

A year ago, I was not allowed to continue the Whatsapp installation without giving access to my contacts. This was on Android. I did install it on an older Android phone I use as a backup. That phone did not have any contacts, so I was ok with it. Reason I installed it was because I thought I might need Whatsapp to communicate with our RS Tour Guide. Turns out, it wasn't really needed for the tour.

"A billion dollar internet business to have access to all my friend's emails."

Whatsapp only accesses your contacts' phone numbers, not emails. And if have an iPhone you don't have to share all your contacts; you can limit access only to contacts you want to message.

Obviously you need to think through whether you're comfortable with using it, Not sure about the US, but it's so widely used in Europe and Asia I literally could not operate without it.

WhatsApp requires access to your contacts as that's how you send messages. It scans your contact list and if any of your contacts have WhatsApp, they show up in your WhatsApp contact list. You can't actually send messages to people NOT in your contacts list unless you use one of the workarounds (like when a business has a WhatsApp button on their site). So if you have WhatsApp but you won't share contacts with it (or have no contacts in your phone) the app will be pretty useless. I get why people might have concerns but across Europe (and other continents besides North America) it's the main way people communicate (both personal and business). And it gets around the issue of being charged a lot of money to send a text to someone in a different country, which is what would happen if you used SMS. It's also fully encrypted. I hope that is helpful.

"A billion dollar internet business to have access to all my friend's emails."

Simon, you are right, of course. I should have said "all my friend's email addresses and phone numbers".

And I agree, in many parts of the globe, Whatsapp is pretty essential, no matter what the security implications are. For most folks, the privacy and security concerns are far outweighed by it's benefits.

And honestly, I'm not someone worried about law enforcement agencies or competing businesses getting all my metadata. Really... (And I want all the bots scanning this forum for keywords to know I'm not an interesting target). I decided I'd better add this paragraph.

This discussion led me to search Wikipedia for "Whatsapp". It was extremely interesting. A lot of information to read, especially the "Security and Privacy" section.

There's one more step - every person they want to call also has to
have a WhatsApp account.

This is the problem I have with using WhatsApp for regular phone calls back home. I have WhatsApp and use it (mostly to reach friends in Europe) but my 97-year old mother with only a landline and the tenants in my rental units can't be expected to have to use an app to reach me. And I want them and anyone else to simply be able to call me on my U.S. phone number.

At one time Verizon had a dedicated international help desk and the people seemed to be very knowledgeable and helpful. Not sure if that is still the case, but perhaps going straight to "the horse's mouth" will give you the best answer. Perhaps not. But it is at least worth a call.

The number at that time was 1-800-711-8300.

A public service announcement:

TC from Atlanta just posted a very useful phone number for Verizon International service. If I were a Verizon customer I'd copy that down, it could be very useful.

BUT... I see TC from Atlanta has posted 5475 times, so my personal opinion is I'd trust TC. If TC showed as "1 Post", I would NOT trust that phone number.

Now back to your regular scheduled programming....