You're traveling overseas. You've got your passport, your hotel is booked, Google Maps is working and your travel eSIM has you connected to the internet. Everything is going beautifully.
Then your flight gets changed.
You need to call the airline.
Or maybe the hotel can't find your reservation. Your credit card suddenly gets declined. Your luggage didn't arrive. The tour company that's supposed to pick you up is nowhere to be found. You find the telephone number online, tap it and suddenly realize something you hadn't thought about before you left home:
How exactly am I supposed to call this number?
It's a surprisingly common problem for international travelers, particularly now that so many people use travel eSIMs. Many travel eSIM plans provide mobile data but don't include conventional cellular voice service or a telephone number, although some plans do include voice and SMS.
The good news is that if you have an internet connection, making an actual telephone call while traveling can be much easier—and much cheaper—than you might think.
The Calls You Don't Think About Until You Need Them
Before a trip, most of us think about staying connected in terms of internet access. We want Google Maps, email, Facebook, WhatsApp, Grab, Uber, airline apps and hotel reservations. Buy a travel eSIM or local SIM, get some data and you're ready to go.
Mostly, you are.
The problem appears when you need to contact a business that isn't conveniently sitting on WhatsApp waiting for your message. Maybe you need to call your airline's customer-service number, speak with the front desk at a small hotel, contact your credit-card company or call a restaurant to change a reservation.
These aren't necessarily calls you're going to make every day. But when you need one, you often really need one.
Why WhatsApp and Messenger Don't Always Solve the Problem
WhatsApp, Messenger, FaceTime and similar apps are fantastic for communicating with friends and family. If both people use the same service, you can make voice and video calls over an internet connection without using conventional cellular voice service.
Businesses are another story.
The telephone number listed for an airline, bank, hotel, government office or restaurant may simply be a regular mobile or landline number. There may be no WhatsApp account associated with it, and you obviously can't FaceTime an airline's reservations department.
That's the important distinction: internet calling between two app users and calling an actual telephone number aren't always the same thing.
Option #1: Use Your Philippine SIM and Roam
If you're traveling from the Philippines and you've kept your regular SIM active, you may be able to simply dial the number using your Philippine mobile service.
That's certainly convenient, and depending on your carrier and roaming package it may sometimes make sense. But before making the call, check what your carrier charges for voice calls in the country you're visiting. Your travel eSIM providing inexpensive data doesn't necessarily mean a call made through your regular Philippine SIM is using that inexpensive data. Your home carrier may treat it as an international roaming voice call.
For a quick two-minute call, perhaps that's no big deal. Spend 35 minutes on hold with an airline or bank, though, and the mathematics can become considerably less entertaining.
Option #2: Buy a Local SIM With Voice Service
Another possibility is buying a local SIM or eSIM that includes a telephone number and voice service.
This can be a very good option if you're spending several weeks or months in one country and expect to make lots of local calls. You'll have a local number and can use your phone much like a resident.
For a one-week holiday involving several countries, however, buying and setting up local telephone service everywhere you go may be more trouble than it's worth. This is one reason travel eSIMs have become so popular in the first place: they're designed to make getting internet access abroad simple.
Option #3: Turn Your Internet Connection Into Your Telephone Line
There's another solution that's particularly useful if you already have a travel eSIM.
Use the internet connection from your eSIM—or hotel, airport or café Wi-Fi—to make the telephone call through an internet calling service.
This is essentially what CPI Call Shop does. The internet connection gets the call from your phone to CPI's calling network, and from there the call is connected to the actual mobile or landline number you're dialing.
That means the hotel doesn't need CPI.
The airline doesn't need CPI.
Your bank doesn't need CPI.
You're calling their normal telephone number.
That's the part that makes this especially useful for travelers.
What Can You Call?
Pretty much any situation where you need to reach a normal mobile or landline number can become a candidate for an internet call.
You're standing at the airport and need to call the airline about a cancelled flight. Your hotel transfer hasn't arrived and you need to call the driver. Your credit card has been blocked after you bought something overseas and you need to speak with the bank. You want to call a restaurant, travel agency, insurance company, government office or car-rental company.
And of course, you can also call friends and family who aren't using the same messaging app as you.
CPI Call Shop is designed for calling real mobile and landline telephone numbers around the world, so you aren't limited to calling another CPI user.
Calling a Number in the Country You're Visiting
Here's an example.
Suppose you're an American expat living in the Philippines and you're traveling in Japan. You've installed a travel eSIM for Japan, so your phone has internet access everywhere you go.
You need to call your hotel in Tokyo.
Open the CPI Call Shop calling app on your smartphone, dial the Japanese telephone number using the proper international country code, and make the call. CPI uses your eSIM's internet connection to carry the call rather than relying on international voice roaming from your Philippine mobile provider.
The same idea works if you're in Thailand calling a Thai hotel, Australia calling an Australian restaurant, or the United States calling an American airline.
Your internet connection can be coming from a travel eSIM, local mobile data or Wi-Fi. The important part is simply that your phone has a working internet connection.
What About Calling Back Home?
This is another situation travelers run into constantly.
You're overseas and suddenly need to call your bank, credit-card company, insurance company or another business back home. You may find yourself staring at a US, UK, Australian, Canadian or Philippine telephone number wondering what making a 20-minute international call is going to cost.
With CPI, you can call the actual telephone number through the app using your internet connection. You're not placing a conventional international roaming voice call through your mobile carrier. And CPI’s rates are astoundingly cheap; as low as P2 per minute to over 100 countries.
For expats, this can be particularly useful. You may live in the Philippines but still have banks, credit cards, insurance companies, pensions, government agencies or businesses back in your home country that occasionally require an old-fashioned telephone call.
A Small Tip: Save the Important Numbers Before You Travel
Here's something worth doing before your next trip.
Save the international telephone numbers for your airline, hotel, bank and credit-card companies in your phone before you leave. Make sure they're saved with the correct country code.
If something goes wrong while you're standing in an airport at 11:30 at night, that's not the ideal moment to start figuring out how international dialing works.
Also remember that toll-free numbers don't always behave the same way when called internationally. If your bank or airline publishes both a toll-free number and a regular international number, save the regular international number as well.
You Probably Won't Need It—Until You Do
Most of your communication while traveling will probably happen through apps. You'll message your family on WhatsApp, check into your flight through the airline app and use Google Maps to find your hotel.
And that's exactly how it should be.
CPI isn't trying to replace those things. It's there for the other calls—the ones where somebody gives you a telephone number and says, "Call us."
That's why having an inexpensive way to call actual telephone numbers is a useful addition to your travel setup. You may make only two or three calls during your entire trip, but one of those calls could be the one that gets your credit card working again, finds your missing luggage or gets you into your hotel.
Set Up CPI Before You Travel
The easiest time to get everything ready is before you leave the Philippines.
Choose and purchase one of our World Call international calling plans, starting at just ₱200. Then download the CPI Call Shop calling app, upload the QR code sent to your email and you're good to go.
Your prepaid calling load doesn't expire, so there's no need to use up your balance before the end of your trip. Leave it in your account and it'll still be there the next time you travel—or whenever you need to make an international call from home.
And when your balance eventually gets low, reloading is easy. Log into the CPI Call Shop online portal, choose the amount you'd like to add and your reload is instantly credited to your account.
Then whether you're sitting in a hotel room in Tokyo, standing in an airport in Singapore or drinking a coffee somewhere in Europe, if you've got an internet connection and somebody gives you a telephone number to call...
You've got a telephone.