Affordable Travel

Email is certainly the fastest, cheapest, and most convenient way to stay in touch as you travel away from home, and if you have an email account and can get access to the Internet in a library, cyber caf‚, hotel, or bookstore, you can check your email and send messages to others from almost anywhere on the planet. In order to use the same email account that you are used to using when you are at home or at your office, you should check with your service provider before you travel, and learn the methods they offer for using what is known as “web based” email. With this web-based feature, you can connect to the Internet from anywhere, and then go to the home page of the company that provides your Internet service at home. Once you are on the home page, you can follow the procedures - usually by just clicking on a few directional tabs to guide you to the part of the site where email is available - and check your email, the same you would check it from home. Because you are using a webpage of the company that provides your email service, you don’t have to worry about downloading to your own home based computer. And you can still take advantage of organizational features such as file folders for keeping copies of your emails, multiple email address aliases, and spam filters, while using the web based style email features. Some people get so used to using it while traveling that they keep using the home paged based web mail method even when they get home.

When you go on a long trip, or decide to go and live in another place for an extended visit for work, study, or because you are one of the lucky ones who gets to do such things, keeping track of your mail from home can be a major issue. You can let it accumulate at the post office, but after a few bushels of mail stack up, the post office might decide to cut off your service. You can ask a neighbor to check your mail for you, and tell you if anything urgent arrives, but that means your neighbor will have to read your mail  something that both of you might be uncomfortable about doing. Better yet, you can hire a professional “mail forwarding” company, and let them ship your mail to you by a service like Federal Express or DHL Couriers.

These private companies agree  for a small fee  to have you forward all your mail to them. They can toss out the junk mail if you like, or send everything on to you, and all you have to do is to keep them informed of your addresses as you move about and hop from place to place. They will set up a schedule with you, to send your mail every month, every week, or as often as you like, and they will charge you a fee based on how often they send it.

Staying in touch by phone is easier than ever before, and if you travel to another continent, you might be able to keep your same phone and phone number. Long before you travel, start checking with phone companies to figure out the best plan for you – it might take some time to sort out all your various options, because there are many ways to stay in touch by phone for travelers. Some companies allow you to take your cell phone to another continent, and continue business as usual, but they increase the fees for calls since they are considered international calls while you are gone. Other companies will sell you a phone that works in the place you’re going, so that you have phone service in your hand when you arrive. And sometimes you can take your cell phone to a phone company in a foreign country and they will put a chip into it that allows you to switch over to the local cellular service, for a very reasonable price. Then there are the new companies that let you place calls from your laptop computer by using special headphones and software. The advantage to this kind of phone service is that you can make as many calls as you want, for free, if you use the company Skyper, based in Estonia. The downside is of course that if your phone rings, you have to put your laptop up to your ear (just kidding).