If you are planning to travel in France for a short trip or a for a long stay, you may be wondering how to save money on roaming data. Many telco company have international travel plan but with limited option and data. Here we give you our best tips for saving on roaming data while traveling in France.
The best method to avoid roaming fees while travelling is to go to settings on your phone, turn off ‘mobile data’ and ‘data roaming’. Also turn off any applications that use data in the background or sync automatically and download offline apps for FRANCE!
If you drive around France, you should not use GPS apps or you will use a lot of data. We recommend using the inbuilt GPS in the car to save on roaming fees.
1- MAKE SURE YOUR ACCOMMODATION HAS A DECENT WIFI CONNECTION
If you start your stay in Paris, you’ll probably have a decent wifi connection in any type of accommodation. Most hotels and apartments will have a good connectivity included in the price of the room. And it will be like that in most of the biggest cities in France.
However if you travel outside of Paris, it can be difficult to find accommodation with a good connection. Most of holiday rentals will not have wifi connection available. Even in a little local hotel, you may experience a very slow connection.
When traveling around in France, French people will use their personal smartphones to access to the internet.
2 – SPOT THE FREE WIFI ZONES IN FRANCE
There are free wifi zones in the biggest city – Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux. Free wifi zones can be found in public libraries and in the biggest museums. The biggest train stations and airports will have free internet access too.
However the connection is often quite slow, you may have to create an account and log to a “session”. Sometime there is a time limitation. And the connection is not very secured. We don’t recommend doing any transactions or connect to personal accounts like online banking account.
3 – GET A LOCAL SIM CARD
Photo credit @Free mobile
To be able to use your own phone for calls and WiFi access in France, you’ll have to check first if it’s unlocked and compatible with tri-band/GSM. Then, you can buy a sim card available at mobile stores such as SFR boutique, Orange and Free. You’ll find mobile stores in every main cities or in shopping malls.
Local calls are affordable but international calls and mobile data usage can be very expensive.