During my 1 month travel to Europe from Canada, I had to purchase 3 Vodaphone sim cards because 2 stopped working. I required access to internet/data during my travels and have 2 sim cards break down on me was extremely inconvenient and costed me valuable time on my vacation. Below is an explanation of what happened.
On May 9th, I arrived in Lisbon, Portugal where I purchased a Vodaphone sim card for 20 Euros at the airport which included 5gb of data, some international calling and texting for the month. The customer service representative was rude, and did not explain how it all worked in depth (I noticed my time with the customer service rep was significantly shorter than everybody else's that went before me). Roughly 2 weeks later in Italy, my friend tried to make a phone call back to Canada using a calling card but the call did not go through, wasting the calling card. I received a text message shortly afterwards that translated to "For security issues, we will inhibit the use of this service. It has a period of 12 hours to contact the Vodaphone support channels". I no longer had service; and had no way of contacting Vodaphone.
Luckily, Sorrento, Italy had a Vodaphone so I went to their store the next day to see if they could resolve the issue. Understandably, they could not resolve the issue because it was a sim card from Portugal. I was disappointed to find out that I would just have to purchase another sim card that would be valid for one month for the rest of my trip. This cost me 25 Euros, but it included 15gb, and some more international minutes & texts allowance.
About 10 days later, my data was barely working and came to a complete halt a few hours later. I tried to restart the phone, shut it down over night and searched many other ways to resolve the issue since I still had a network connection. I was on a day trip out the Groningen at this point and had to take it to a Vodaphone store there. The customer service rep was very friendly, but he was stumped. Again, I had to purchase another sim card; this time it was 10 Euros for 2GB with some international calling and texts. This would go on to suffice for the rest of our trip.
Resolving the second sim card issue took 3 hours to resolve, including the time needed to stop at Starbucks to use free Wifi to find solutions. This occurred on my day trip out to Groningen, where we had rented bikes to visit where my boyfriend's grandparents used to live. We were unable to do that without reliable GPS systems sourced by cellular data, and frankly we did not have enough time to do the one thing we planned to do on this day trip because resolving the sim card issue took so long and we had a bus to catch back to Amsterdam.
Overall, the sim cards provided data with good speed, but the lack of reliability was extremely disruptive and stress inducing to our vacation. The sim cards cost me roughly $90 CAD, but I lost valuable time and experiences on my vacation due to faulty services.
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