Phone calling cards to US

My college age son is traveling to Berlin for a week. Is it best to buy a calling card before he leaves, or to purchase one in Berlin? If in Berlin, where should he go to get one? Thanks!

|||

You can buy them all over the city, like at internet cafes and kiosks. I would get one here, you get a much better deal. Those AT%26amp;T international cards are a total rip-off. I think a card here for 5 €, you can talk for about .02 cents a minute. In fact most of the internet cafes have phones to use and they are usually a good deal too. If he wants to use the card from a hotel room, he needs to ask the front desk clerk how to use it, as some hotels charge anyway, plus there are 2 numbers on the back of the card, one is for calls in Germany, and the other is for international. He needs to be sure he is using the right one. If the hotel is still charging, then it is a way better deal to go down to the internet cafes, and they are pretty easy to find too.

|||

Perhaps this is a dumb question but when calling from an internet cafe do you still have to use a calling card, or does the cafe bill you for the call?

|||

We were in Berlin in Feb and going back again in June...we bought a %26quot;banana%26quot; phone card to use at the hotel...worked only half the time, and come to find out the hotel we stayed at charged us 3.50 euro each time we dialed out on it, whether it connected or not!!! we used the phone stores/internet stores where the phone calls to the US were very cheap...my sprint pcs phone didn%26#39;t work, and it was too expensive to purchase a phone there with a plan, as you can only get that with a german permananet address...it was very difficult to call the US, but we were with family who lives there so we used there home phone mostly...you can use the phone cards from pay phones, and land lines, but be VERY CAREFUL using the cards from hotels...

|||

Thanks for the info. What I still don%26#39;t understand is how one makes a call at an internet cafe -- do they have phone booths that you use with a card, or do they just bill you for calls like they bill you for using the internet? I%26#39;ll be in Berlin next week and have just realized that I have some relatives who demand my attention back home.

|||

We used a phone store, and we walked in, told the girl we wanted to call the US, she gave us the per minute price in euro, can%26#39;t remember what it was but we simply went into the phone booth and made the call...my 10 to 15 minutes phone call was like 2.00 american..it was very cheap, I understand thats the best way to call the US...just not that convenient, but those stores are all over, we used one that was just before the euro center in west berlin, after the berlin zoo...and as I said before we had the banana card and it pretty much was worthless, as the hotel killed us in xtra charges for using it...

|||

Thanks a lot -- that%26#39;s what I like about tripadvisor. Friendly strangers answering oddly useful questions! Cheers.

|||

The calling card in Berlin to call the US is called %26quot;Go Bananas%26quot; and it has a picture of a banana on it talking on the phone. You can get this almost any where. You can even just ask for an international calling card to call the US and most shopkeepers will give you the right card.

If your hotel doesn%26#39;t charge for the call (mine didn%26#39;t) then calling from your hotel room is the best bet using the card because like calling cards in the US there is a steep surcharge on minutes if you use a pay phone. So, you can talk on a pay phone for 15 minutes or so, but on other phones you could talk for hours.