Whether you’re travelling for a week on business or taking a year off to trudge around the world with a backpack, there are bound to be people you really want to stay in touch with while you are away.
Cellphone roaming is perhaps the option South Africans are most used to, but it comes at an often prohibitively high price.
Good news on the travel communication front is that a new South African innovation — called v4t — offers the convenience of roaming at a much more attractive price tag.
A clever and simple to operate international voicemail system, v4t allows you to buy-in for a specified period for which you are allocated a voicemail box number.
The next step is to deactivate your cellphone voicemail and leave a message detailing how to leave a message on v4t. For the folks back home, it is a local call to a cellphone number. All you do is dial in to a local number in the country you are in and retrieve the voicemails.
If it is a simple query, you can reply by voicemail — even if the recipient is not connected to the system. You dial in their cellphone number and they will get a message explaining to them how to retrieve their message by dialling in to v4t locally. (This only works for South Africa.)
You can also use the system to keep track of other travellers. Of course, on its own this would be pretty frustrating but, combined with roaming and/or e-mail, it makes staying in touch with family, friends and business associates so much more affordable.
The system works in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Britain Canada, Denmark, England, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States.
For more information, check out www.v4t.net