Phoning Italy hotel from US

If you don't want to use an international calling card, you can try using Viber (free app) on your mobile phone, but the other party also has to have Viber on their mobile phone, so I would ask if they also use Viber. I've also heard of What's App but I've never tried it so I'm not sure how that works. You can also Skype, one hotel offered to do it that way for me because I also was uncomfortable sending credit card information via e-mail.

You can call any regular phone in the world for a small cost with Skype or Google Hangouts on a smart phone or tablet (possible on a regular PC if you have a microphone too, doesn't work as well). But you'll have to buy $10 USD of credit with either Skype or Google. Then it costs only a few cents a minute to call, drawing down your credit. Spending $10 for single call (to buy the credit) seems silly, but it makes more sense if you might use the remaining credit over the years to make more calls. You can use it on a smart phone while you travel for example to make local calls, so it can come in handy.

Are you sure they don't accept Paypal?

Thanks for the workable solutions! (Re: Paypal. The credit card info is simply to hold the room, not for payment, so I don't think PayPal is an option here. )

You can use Skype as suggested above, or other similar VoIP methods.

I often use my regular phone since their retes are under 5 cents per minute to call European landlines or just over 30 cents a minute to call European monbile phones. Not much more than Skype.

My long distance carrier is below:
https://www.g3telecom.com/telna

If by email you split the number into two separate emails. Never had a problem doing it that way.

When I email important financial data to my family, which I have to do often, I split the data in two different messages. I generally send the first set of numbers via email, and the last digits numbers via text message or another email from a different address at a later time.

I doubt splitting a credit card number into two separate email messages really reduces your security risk that much. If the recipient's email account is hacked, and they never bothered to erase your two messages with the credit card numbers, how difficult is it for someone to combine them? Because credit card numbers have a "checksum" embedded in them, it wouldn't even be that hard for a thief to scan for partial numbers and combine them, automatically. If you hack into a hotel's email account and you find that they routinely receive credit card numbers in their email, you could harvest a lot of credit card numbers quickly - and use the checksum to make sure you've got them correct.

Still, emailing a full credit card number (even in a single email message) might be worth the low risk, if you use say a rarely used spare credit card for example. I have a couple of cards like that: should probably just cancel them but I hang on to them as spares. Using one of them to secure a hotel room - but use my "regular" card to pay for real later - is probably low risk. What if it is compromised? Should be easy to tell because I use the spare card so rarely - and if it does get hacked, I'll get a free replacement card with a new number. Not a huge inconvenience for a spare card.

Andrew H, use that spare card! A hacker got into the credit card issuer's database and stole credit card numbers that had been inactive for a long period. One of my cards was compromised, and it was a hassle to replace (I was leaving for Europe in two days, where I planned to use that card). The credit card rep said that this is becoming more frequent.