This is a bit of an unusual post as it has nothing to do with photography but I will justify it as a way of saving some money to put toward photography!
I am recently back from a few weeks in Austria and with the exorbitant cost of mobile roaming and need for internet access a local SIM card is essential. Part of our travel involved a trip to Budapest so we needed a card that would roam outside of Austria
I researched this online before leaving home and from travel blog posts I had read it seemed that Drei was the best provider to offer a prepaid plan with data and roaming outside of Austria. I printed out a screenshot of what I wanted but was then told at the Drei shop that this wasn’t available to do what we needed. Some of this could have been related to the limitations of Google translate on their website but in the end achieving what we needed cost €45 as there was an additional charge of €9.90 for the SIM card. This was over twice what I had anticipated so instead of buying a card for each of our phones we just purchased one. This fitted into my son’s phone and was quickly working without a hitch.
As we became more familiar with getting about Vienna we realised we needed another functioning phone to keep in contact. My sister mentioned that one of their supermarket chains, Hofer, was offering mobile phone services so explored this option a bit further. The local supermarket had starter packs for €2 and a top up card for €10. This was easily activated and installed on my phone with QR code applying the necessary settings. The Hofer app (Mein HoT) allowed me to select which plan I wanted to use my €10 for and I chose their HoT fix which gave me 1000 mins or txt as well as 8GB of mobile data. This worked perfectly and roamed seamlessly to Hungary.
If I had been aware of this option prior to travelling I could have got an Austrian SIM for all 3 of our phones for less than the price of the initial one I bought. The only limitation we encountered was that the HoT card would not allow me to set up a hotspot on my phone whereas the Drei card would. The Drei option gave us 30GB of data ( we could have saved €10 by taking the lowest amount available) but as I used less than 0.5GB the HoT option was more than enough.
On returning home simply changing out the Drei SIM and reinserting the original SIM in my son’s phone had it working immediately. For mine I needed to manually re-enter the internet setting in the mobile data settings before 4G was back in action.
If you’re travelling to Austria and need a local SIM card for your mobile I can happily recommend the Hofer option as very simple, cost-effective and easy. The money saved would easily cover a week pass on the amazing Vienna public transport system or cover some museum/gallery entry fees. Hofer stores are ubiquitous and the staff were very helpful. Austria is a great destination and I will share some of my travel, street and bird photography in future posts.
Wachau photo with Fuji XT3 and Fuji 18-55 f2.8-4 lens.
