I initially signed up for the Travel Pass for a trip to Ireland/England thinking that it sounded great to be able to use our existing data and voice overseas as a neat little work around to having to buy sim cards overseas. I have to say I'm a bit frustrated with it.
First of all, our devices immediately started internationally data when we landed, despite being in airplane mode and only being on WiFi. I would have rather it started when I agreed to start it. There is no "text back to start" it's just on and your getting charged. This seemed to happen on the way back as well. Despite our flight taking off after the 24 hour mark, somehow it still registered that we were overseas and the moment we took our phones out of airplane mode when back in the US, found out that while we were in the air, over the Atlantic Ocean, it started a new session for a day we weren't even going to use our phones overseas. I really wish it had some kind of "text to start" feature cause I feel a bit scammed out of almost 2 full days worth of TravelPass.
Additionally, service was pretty "meh". We seemed to do okay in Ireland, had probably 3-4 bars of 4G data while in towns, and it dropped to other service in the country side (which is to be expected). However, the data seemed a little on the slow side and sometimes sites would just not load. Definitely not 4G data rates, but fairly usable and stuff still loaded 98% of the time. In England however, London of all places, data service was horrible! You'd think with almost constant max bars of 4G you'd be able to do thinks like get directions with Google, check out a restaurant's website, or really anything. It was bad enough that we pretty much relied solely upon wifi when available. It was almost mandatory to have data on your phone some times and at this point we only had a few days in London, so we decided to bite the bullet and just use it, but never again. I'm pretty sure Verizon customers are put on the back burner with data (because of Roaming) and there were probably always at capacity on the cell towers, so my data got downgraded. I'd much rather go through the pain of setting up a local sim card, probably save a ton of money, and just use international communication apps instead of texting.
Sorry Verizon, I cannot in good faith recommend anyone use or rely upon Travel Pass, and I'm guessing by extension, any of the other international travel plans. I understand they have agreements for these sort of things, and that I wouldn't have 4G LTE over there, or that it might even be 3G data at times, but I've been to areas in the US were there was 3G data and this was much worse than that. Yet again, if they just had a "text to start" feature, I probably wouldn't have complained, probably would have just not turned it on if I found out it wasn't living up to expectations.
