Telestial Inc.Reviews of telestial.com

Telestial used to be a good company but they have changed. For us in North America we used to get a U.S. number with our U.K./Global number. They changed that so the US number is $2/month and they make it difficult to keep your balance active to. When they made their service change they said they sent us an email (which I never received) about my old sim being inactive and having to get a new one. There are better international mobile services out there. Telestial also refuses to refund my balance to me as well. Go with a different company.

Absolute joke with regards to pricing. 3x days into my European holiday (30 days) and $50 credit has already been maxed. My phone is not constantly roaming and I ensure to keep mobile data off until required. My time on mobile data has also been minimal with only a few photos posted and social media feeds refreshed. Refusing to recharge and give this company more of my money. Would have been cheaper to use my Australian Sim card and pay the roaming fees... Giving 2 stars as reception is adequate.

I bought the JT travel Buddy Worldwide usage. The price is reasonable and I only wanted it for a few calls. I am also not very phone savvy. First of all, the users guide is not very complete - for example, the phone will lock up and there is no information on how to unlock. The big problem though is that the battery lasts only 12-15 hours if the phone is on. I charged it overnight and it had died by the time I was supposed to receive a 9 PM call. Their customer service answered my emails promptly - I give them that. Also beware that if you use the help button on the phone, the time is subtracted from your minutes.

While the sim card does work in some countries I visited, it didn't work in Cambodia (where, until Telestial updated their website for phone compliance as a result of my complaint, it was supposed to work) and Nepal, where it didn't work in the 2 cities I visited, the capital Kathmandu and the 5th largest city, Bharatpur. Customer service was polite enough by email, but I would have to go through multiple debugging procedures with their technicians over the course of 48 hours, none of which I particularly had time for. Bottom line - I cannot rely on their list of countries this card is supposed to work in, and plan to use my ATT sim in the future (which worked everywhere I went).

I ordered the Passport Plus for my 6-month adventure to Europe. The card is advertised that it works in 70+ countries. I bought it because it listed all the countries I was going to visit. But I'm just going to cut straight to the point here. Making phone calls flat out didn't work once I left England (not even the whole of the U.K.). Once I was in Scotland and nearly every single of the other 17 countries I visited, making a phone call was impossible. I would dial the number, wait for the call back, but nothing would come. I would then try the number again and would get the message 'Call Not Allowed.' This can be quite a pain in the ass frankly when you're someone is supposed to pick you up at a train station and you can't get a hold of them. The only thing that seemed to work from time to time was texting, but when you're calling a landline, obviously this doesn't work. So after a six month trip in first world countries, I whole-heartedly can not recommend this company.

This company claims to provide a single phone number you can use across Europe. It is n't so. The SIM chip did not work in the first phone I tried, and technical support calls used up all of the "Free" time on the chip, and didn't help anyway. You have to buy in $30 increments so they get to "keep " a lot of unused time. "YOU DIAL A NUMBER AND THEY RING YOU BACK" . No where in their literature did they tell you that . It was useless. I had an emergency at work and I wound up being unable to be reached on my telestial phone number. In my opinion, buy and unlocked phone and use local chips purchased at a phone store with a phone card, and you will be better off. This company is horrible in both customer support and service actually provided.

Shipping was prompt and the setup was not difficult. I would not say the website was absolutely intuitive. I did have to click around a bit when it came to logging into the correct place as there seems to be several ways to login. What I am most displeased with (outside of the 10 minute hold time for support) is the misinformation on the web page prior to purchasing. The web page states that there is a charge to forward phone calls, but leads one to believe not if the phone is home and turned off: "Perfect for the business traveler, the Passport Plus features free call forwarding when you are home and the Passport Plus SIM card is not in use." Unfortunately, for me, this was one of the main reasons I chose Telestial over some others. They did offer to accept a return, but I do not have the time to deal with it now.