Wanted to give a brief update on my trip.
Countries covered:- Switzerland
- France
- Italy
- Austria
- Germany
Plan(s):
Smart Passport
Smart 200 (Italy)
Dates: 1/30 - 2/9
Summary: These plans worked out great and I think saved a quite a bit of money since we covered so many countries.
Details: When we landed in Switzerland, I received a text for the Smart Passport fee and my phone worked without a hitch. This is the first time for me using the Smart Passport plan. For the remainder of the trip, I used the Smart Passport plan outside of Italy. As outlined in the link above, the plan costs 3 euro/day. This includes 50 minutes, 50 texts and unlimited data. The charge of 3 euros/day seems to be per country too, so if you are in two countries on the same day, you get charged 3 euros for each, this happened once for me. Each day I used my phone outside of Italy, I received a text to notify me that I was using the Smart Passport and would be charged 3 euros.
The Smart 200 plan was 9.98 euros, I think, and was used while I was in Italy. The plan included 200 minutes, 200 text and 1GB of data. Unfortunately, if you don't have a plan for Italy, you are charged 4 euros/day for 500mb of data and per minute and per text. Since I knew we would be in Italy for a few days, having a plan made sense for me.
During my whole stay I was only on 3G and never saw LTE. This is probably a function of the plans that I was using as last year I saw LTE in Italy. Speed was a non-issue in every country and the roaming partners seemed to all have good coverage as well.
Let me know if you have questions.