Vacation

A Comprehensive Guide to Choosing the Right SIM Card for Travel

Published

3 years ago

September 14, 2020

curator

Whether you use your sim card to keep in touch with your home, stay connected with your fellow travellers or surf internet for restaurant reviews and maps, travel Sim card offers a better way to use your mobile phones without relying on Wi-Fi or spending a lot of cash on international roaming charges. But with various options out there in the market, getting the right mobile package you require can be a challenging task. In this guide to international Sim cards below covers the primary advantages of a travel sim, define the key terms and weigh up the pros and cons of various popular options.

What is sim cards

It is a removable chip used by modems and mobile phone. Sim cards stores encrypted service key of the specific subscriber used in the process of identifying themselves to the network. Therefore, it’s possible to alter the consumer’s subscription from one terminal.

SIM Only Mobile deals give you a set of monthly allowances of talk time minutes, data and texts. They are cheaper than the traditional mobile contract as Sim-only deals doesn’t use bundle in the expenses of your phone itself. You will now have your own put your SIM or purchase a new one.

Best Sim Card for Travel

OneSim

OneSimCard is a branch of licenced interexchange carrier- Belmont Telecom Inc., that has been providing telecommunication services in the United States since 1994. The firm offers prepaid travellers SIM Card with a promise to save its users up to 85% of the roaming charges while travelling internationally.

This SIM Card is available in three varieties: Expedition SIM, Universal SIM and Europe & more Sim. The three cards can fit Nano, micro and standard Sim slots and they come accompanied by $10 for voice. The three cards come with two numbers: An Estonian European number and a secondary US, Canadian, UK or Australian number. You can order unlimited personal extra numbers from more than 60 countries you wish.

Outgoing calls using OneSim begin at 25c/min. Text messages are free of charge to send or receive anywhere. Data bundles charges usually start at 20c/Mb with monthly, weekly and daily packages available.

WorldSIM

This service provider provides a prepaid travel SIM Card that offers calls, SMS and bundles plans. It claims that the SIM card will assist its users in cutting roaming expenses by up to 95%. The card can fit the standard, micro and Nano SIM Card slots. The line is free, and all you need is to purchase the credit that you refill it. The credit you add has no expiry date provided that you use the card once per year.

The Sim Card comes with the free UK and US mobile number. You can add unlimited numbers for over 50 countries using Virtual Number Service. You can opt to use the same roam on your existing number without any charges.

TravelSIM

TravelSIM provides a prepaid Travel SIM Card that features plans for texts, calls and data. It works in more than 170+ countries globally can reduce the roaming costs up to 85%. All SIM cards are triple-punched to fit all tablets and phones and some with Estonian European numbers. The TravelSIM cards can cost 10 euros and pay for extra to add a data plan or credit.

All the incoming calls and SMS are free in more than 135 countries. Your SIM card will be active provided that you refill credit once at least every 18 months. You can purchase both prepaid and credit plans with TravelSIM.

Knowroaming

Knowroaming sells travel sim cards that work with calls, data and SMS. The company offers an individual sticker that you place it over your original home SIM card to convert your SIM card to Prepaid international SIM card.

After applying that sticker and download the app, you can start saving cash on roaming more than 200 territories over the world. These stickers can cost you around $30. You can opt to purchase regular KnowRoaming SIM card that can cost you $10 and it works like a sticker.

Using Knowroaming, you will get a US number that you can use to buy other foreign numbers for more than 50 countries for free that ranges from $3 to $12.50 a month.

GigSky

GigSky offers triple-cut data only travel SIM Card for more than 120 countries in the world. Once you have downloaded GigSky smartphone app and purchase the SIM card to configure and activate the SIM Card, you are ready to go. The SIM Card offers two types of data plans that are non-regional plans for individual countries and regional plans such as Europe, Asia and North America.

The validity period of the data ranges between 1 to 30 days, and data package ranges from 300MB up to 5 GB although for some country plan packages go up to 1GbB or less.

GoSIM

GoSIM is one of the significant players in the Travel SIM Card market and like most of the competitors, offers data, calls and SMS plans. The sim card offers coverage in 200+ countries the world and claims to save up to 90% on roaming costs. The SIM Card comes with an Estonia-based European number and charges $19 with $10 credit included.

Therefore, with GoSIM card, you can get free incoming calls, SMS in all countries. Unused credit or airtime is valid for 18 months. Paying as you go charges begin at $0.25/MB, but you can save a lot by buying the prepaid data plans which can go up to 2GB with the validity of up to 30 days.

KeepGo

KeepGo was founded in 2009 as a company that designs worldwide connectivity solutions from broadband devices and the Internet of Things. The firm develops two types of SIM cards; Lifetime Data SIM Card and Smartwatch Data SIM Card.

The lifetime data sim is a triple SIM that’s exclusively for data bundles, with no ability to send texts or make calls. It will cost you $49 with one GB of data included. The SIM Card offers coverage in about 110 countries, and the number will go up in future.

The KeepGo’s Smartwatch SIM Card is similar to the data SIM Card, but it is designed to connect your smartwatch to both 2G and 3G networks in more than 110 countries, and it will cost you $10 with % MB of included there.

The post A Comprehensive Guide to Choosing the Right SIM Card for Travel appeared first on Travel Experta – Family Travel Blog.

By: Marina Villatoro
Title: A Comprehensive Guide to Choosing the Right SIM Card for Travel
Sourced From: feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheTravelExperta/~3/Dg1D4Jvb45U/sim-card-for-travel.html
Published Date: Wed, 09 Sep 2020 19:51:32 +0000

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Vacation

What could you order from Ansett Airlines’ inflight bar in the early 1970s?

Published

3 years ago

November 19, 2020

curator

People have always liked to drink on board flights, especially people from Australia. Therefore, it should be no surprise to anyone that there was an inflight bar offering in the 1970s.

Ansett Airlines were a major player in the Australian domestic market up until their demise in September 2001. For many years, there were two domestic airlines, Trans-Australia Airlines (TAA) and Ansett.

Ansett’s Inflight Bar

At the time, Ansett operated Boeing 727s, Douglas DC-9s and Fokker F27 Friendships on domestic routes in the country. Airline tickets were quite expensive, with tariffs agreed upon by both airlines thanks to Australia’s weird two-airline policy at the time.

While tickets were expensive and food complimentary, you still had to pay for a drink at the bar. Here is an inflight bar menu from the era, showing the drinks available and their prices.

Clearly the pricing is astounding by today’s standards – 30 cents for a beer? I’ll have thirty-three please! I like how Australian gin is 35c while the imported gin is just 5c more. Which would you choose?

You can tell it is from another era as you can buy cigarettes on board. These price up at 45c, a far cry from the extortionate prices people in the west pay these days for a smoke!

Overall Thoughts

The on board offering is pretty comprehensive for internal flights, and I imagine you’d be hard pressed not to find something you might like. In those times, all payments would have been by cash as well, which would have meant a lot of coinage being handled on board.

Of course, things haven’t changed too much over the years. On many airlines you pay for your drinks just as they did back in the 1970s. Shame the prices aren’t the same of course!

Did you ever buy drinks on board flights from the inflight bar back in the day? Do you still? Thank you for reading and if you have any comments or questions, please leave them below.

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Featured image by Daniel Tanner on Airliners.net via Wikimedia Commons.
Menu image by Ikara on Australian Frequent Flyer.

By: The Flight Detective
Title: What could you order from Ansett Airlines’ inflight bar in the early 1970s?
Sourced From: travelupdate.com/ansett-airlines-inflight-bar-menu/
Published Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2020 15:03:14 +0000

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Vacation

These Shrimp Leave the Safety of Water and Walk on Land. But Why?

Published

3 years ago

November 18, 2020

curator

The shrimp stop swimming at dusk and gather near the river’s edge. After sunset, they begin to climb out of the water. Then they march. All night long, the inch-long crustaceans parade along the rocks.

The parading shrimp of northeastern Thailand have inspired legends, dances and even a statue. (Locals also eat them.) During the rainy season, between late August and early October, tourists crowd the riverbanks with flashlights to watch the shrimp walk.

Watcharapong Hongjamrassilp first learned about the parading shrimp, and the hundred thousand or more tourists who come each year to see them, about 20 years ago. When he started studying biology, he returned to the topic. “I realized that we know nothing about this,” he said: What species are they? Why and how do they leave the safety of the water to walk upstream on dry land? Where are they going?

Mr. Hongjamrassilp, a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, decided to answer those questions himself. His findings appeared this month in the Journal of Zoology.

Working with wildlife center staff members, Mr. Hongjamrassilp staked out nine sites along a river in Thailand’s Ubon Ratchathani province. They found shrimp parading at two of the sites — a stretch of rapids, and a low dam.

The videos they recorded revealed that the shrimp paraded from sundown to sunup. They traveled up to 65 feet upstream. Some individual shrimp stayed out of the water for 10 minutes or more.

“I was so surprised,” Mr. Hongjamrassilp said, “because I never thought that a shrimp can walk that long.” Staying in the river’s splash zone may help them keep their gills wet, so they can keep taking in oxygen. He also observed that the shells of the shrimp seem to trap a little water around their gills, like a reverse dive helmet.

DNA analysis from captured shrimp showed that nearly all belonged to the species Macrobrachium dienbienphuense, part of a genus of shrimp that live mostly or fully in freshwater. Many Macrobrachiumspecies spend part of their lives migrating upstream to their preferred habitats.

Most parading shrimp that Mr. Hongjamrassilp captured were young. Observations and lab experiments showed that these shrimp probably leave the water when the flow becomes too strong for them. Larger adult shrimp can handle a stronger current without washing away, so they’re less likely to leave the water.

Walking on land is dangerous for the little shrimp, even under cover of darkness. Predators including frogs, snakes and large spiders lurk nearby, Mr. Hongjamrassilp says. “Literally, they wait to eat them along the river.”

And the shrimp can survive on land for only so long. If the parading crustaceans lose their way, they may dry out and die before they get back to the river. A few times, Mr. Hongjamrassilp came across groups of lost shrimp dead on the rocks, their once-translucent bodies baked pink.

Yet most navigate upstream successfully, and scientists have spotted other freshwater shrimp around the world performing similar feats, scaling dams and even climbing waterfalls.

Leaving the water when the swimming gets tough may have helped these animals spread to new habitats over their evolutionary history, Mr. Hongjamrassilp said. Today, the number of parading shrimp in Thailand seems to be declining. He thinks tourist activity may be a factor, and learning more about the shrimp might help protect them.

The study’s authors made “some really excellent observations,” said Alan Covich, an ecologist at the University of Georgia who was not involved in the research. But understanding why the Ubon Ratchathani shrimp move upstream, and how far they travel, will require more research, he said.

“The most surprising thing to me was that it attracted so many tourists,” Dr. Covich said. He doesn’t know of any other example of people gathering to appreciate a crustacean in quite the same way.

“We have crayfish festivals, we have all kinds of things,” Dr. Covich said, “but generally it’s people eating them, not watching them move.”

By: Elizabeth Preston
Title: These Shrimp Leave the Safety of Water and Walk on Land. But Why?
Sourced From: www.nytimes.com/2020/11/18/science/shrimp-parade-thailand.html
Published Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2020 17:02:07 +0000

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Vacation

Will Aer Lingus launch transatlantic flights from Manchester?

Published

3 years ago

November 18, 2020

curator

There are reports that Aer Lingus have applied for 1,500 slots at Manchester Airport for the Summer 2021 season. This will allow the airline to base four aircraft there and service flights to the United States.

At present, there have been no press releases from the airline stating what is going on. Even so, it probably makes sense for the Irish airline to do this in the current market.

Aer Lingus And Manchester

From what is known, there will be three Airbus A321LRs and an A330 based at Manchester. These will operate non-stop services to New York JFK, Boston, Chicago and Orlando, and the season starts on 28 March 2021.

With Thomas Cook having gone out of business, there is likely space for another competitor. New York and Orlando will see competition from Virgin Atlantic, while the other two routes have no airline flying at the moment.

Aer Lingus has been connecting passengers over Dublin very successfully from the UK regions for a while now. Due to this, they will have visibility on traffic patterns, potential yields and more, making this an informed decision.

I imagine they also hope to cream off some of the connecting traffic that routes through London Heathrow on British Airways and Amsterdam on KLM among others. It would prove to be quite successful.

Transatlantic Joint Venture Approval

The US Department of Transport has tentatively given its approval for Aer Lingus to join the oneworld transatlantic joint business. This is operated by American Airlines, British Airways, Iberia and Finnair.

These airlines coordinate schedules and pricing, share revenues and expenses. For the consumer, it means more choice – those making a booking on British Airways across the Atlantic will also see options on American Airlines on the BA web site as one example.

Theoretically, it would allow people seeking flights on the British Airways web site to automatically be given options to fly non-stop with Aer Lingus, along with the Manchester-London Heathrow-US city connecting itinerary.

Whether Aer Lingus will join the oneworld alliance, even in a oneworld connect capacity remains to be seen. Frequent flyers would welcome it, especially those in Ireland.

Overall Thoughts

No doubt the boffins have been working behind the scenes to see if the business case for transatlantic flights from Manchester stack up. As things have proceeded as far as a slot application, I would guess chances are good that it will go ahead.

Either way, let’s see if this happens and if it does, whether Aer Lingus will stay for the long haul. If they can make more money elsewhere, they’ll up sticks and leave. Regardless, it is an interesting development in European aviation.

What do you think of Aer Lingus starting transatlantic services from Manchester? Thank you for reading and if you have any comments or questions, please leave them below.

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Featured image by N509FZ via Wikimedia Commons.
Aer Lingus A321neo LR by Pitmanaaron via Wikimedia Commons.
Business class cabin via One Mile At A Time.

By: The Flight Detective
Title: Will Aer Lingus launch transatlantic flights from Manchester?
Sourced From: travelupdate.com/aer-lingus-manchester/
Published Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2020 18:03:48 +0000

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