Travel Tips: SIM Cards, Money, Tipping and the Things That Cost You

The three travel tips files: SIM cards, money, tipping

Each of these covers a subject where the usual advice is a table of products that is wrong within months. They are written the other way round: the structure that stays true, and the method for checking the current numbers yourself.

Prepaid SIM cards for the USA

Three networks, and why coverage, not price, decides it.

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Tipping in the USA

Restaurants, counters, hotels and airports, and why it is not optional.

Open the file →

Which type of travel card

Preloaded, debit, credit or cash, and the five fees that differ.

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Transport, SIM cards and the three things worth doing before departure

Check the phone is unlocked

A carrier-locked handset rejects a foreign SIM, and that is discovered at the worst possible moment. Confirm it before leaving, and check the phone supports the destination's bands: an older model missing the low-band frequencies drops out in exactly the rural areas that matter.

Check the card's foreign transaction fee

Typically two to three per cent, larger than most exchange margins, and often waived on one card in the same bank's range. Five minutes of reading saves more than any amount of comparing headline exchange rates.

Download the maps

Several of the routes on this site have no mobile signal at all; the Big Sur cliffs, the Monument Valley approach, the Yarra Valley gullies. Offline maps cost nothing and remove the single most common navigation failure.

AI

Why these travel tips carry no price table

Prepaid pricing changes several times a year, card terms change without notice, and a price table on a travel site is misleading within months of being written, so these travel tips name no best product and quote no exchange rate. What each file gives instead is the structure: which fees exist, who carries the exchange risk, which network covers where, and a method for checking today's numbers in ten minutes.

That applies as much to a prepaid SIM card USA visitors buy on arrival as to tipping in the USA, where the convention moves slowly but the percentages quietly do not. The same goes for transport: what a fare card costs matters less than knowing which one the local system actually accepts.

The destinations themselves are in all destinations, and the screen material is in the location index.

The pattern these files share

Each of the three subjects here is normally explained with a table of products and prices, and each of those tables is wrong within months. A prepaid SIM card USA carriers sold last spring is a different product this spring, card terms change without notice, and the percentages behind tipping in the USA have moved twice in a decade.

Travel tips written as a snapshot go stale on exactly that schedule. Written as structure: how SIM cards are priced, how a fare is charged on local transport, who takes the exchange margin; they keep working, which is the only reason to publish them at all.

So the files are written the other way round: the structure that stays true, and a method for checking today's numbers in ten minutes. A reader who understands that coverage is a property of the network rather than the brand, that a "no fee" card can hide its cost in the exchange margin, and that the American tipped wage is a wage rather than a bonus, can evaluate any current comparison correctly.

A checklist for the week before departure

• Phone: confirm it is unlocked and supports the destination's bands. This is a two-weeks-ahead task, not an airport one.
• Data: buy an eSIM before leaving, or decide to buy a local SIM on arrival, and check whether your home carrier's roaming already covers it.
• Cards: take one with no foreign transaction fee and a second on a different scheme, carried separately.
• Bank: notify dates and destinations; check daily ATM limits.
• Numbers: record the overseas emergency contact for each card somewhere that is not the phone.
• Maps: download offline coverage for anywhere with no signal: which includes several of the routes on this site.
• Cash: plan for the small amount the destination genuinely needs, and get it from an ATM on arrival instead of at home.

The one rule that saves the most money on transport and cards

When a foreign card terminal or ATM offers to charge you in your home currency, decline it and pay in the local one. That offer is dynamic currency conversion, the rate is chosen by the merchant's provider rather than by your bank, and it is routinely several per cent worse.

It applies to every card type, in every country, at every terminal, and it is the single largest avoidable cost in this whole subject.