Hi

We are off to Thailand in a week or so and would like some advice from forum members about the best and least expensive way to phone home to Australia. We have our mobile phones with us however, in the past have found the call costs from oseas to be very expensive.

Many thanks

Hi there, We have just returned from 2 mths in Thailand and I used my mobile every couple of days.

We bought a Thai Happy Sim card, cost was 199baht which included 50baht of free calls. Then you just buy top up cards (we bought from various 7/11's) normally we bought a 400 - 500 top up card.

I would speak to family in Australia for approx 20 mins and it cost about $5. Its very easy to set up and sooo cheap, messages were 5baht I think.

Another option is to use an internet place and phone home on Skype, only a matter of cents for each call.
Cathy

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http://www.cathyandgarystravelpages.com

If you are using Mobilephone just dial 007 or 008 or 009 then follow by your country code and foloow by the number, you will find it is very very cheap might be 7-15 baht per minute.

CathyP & Songchai

Many thanks for your prompt advice- much appreciated

Before we left for overseas I asked for info about how to maKe cheaper calls back to Oz.The forum members provided some excellent advice. I just thought it wortwhile to share my experiences for others as well.

As a bit of background I had my pre paid Optus mobile set for international roaming before we left. The coverage in Eastern Europe was pretty poor and it didn't work in Vienna and in Turkey it originally worked then for some reason just stopped. When we got to Bangkok it stated to work again but calls to Australia were too expensive. at about $8 a minute.

We went to the MBK centre and found a shop that sold Happy phone cards. Originally when the new sim card was fitted it would not work and I had to have my phone unlocked . The cost was 150 baht. I had purchsded a Happy sim card for 300 baht which gave me an initial 50 baht of included calls. I topped this up with another 300 bt and everything worked fine and off we went phoning home to talk to the kids. The cost was roughly 270bt for about 25-30 mins of calls home. We had one more top up for another 300bt and this lasted for the rest of the week with short 5 minute calls. The Happy sim card is certainly the best way to go. Thanks guys for the advice- much appreciated.

Another option............ we usually take our notebook computer with us and we have gizmo (gmail version of chat)
As long as we have internet in the hotel, we can call other gizmo users and talk live to them for free and we can call other people by calling their landline or mobile from our computer - there's a small charge for this.
Last week, I made 3 hours of calls from Hong Kong to Australia and it cost me AUD 5 about 1/4 the price of discount IDD or phone cards here.