Cruising in the Bahamas is awesome! The islands are beatiful and the beaches are immaculate. The problem is communicating while you are in the Bahamas with friends and family back at home. While visiting here, you can enroll in a cell phone plan that will allow you to use your same phone number for $10 per day. This will include 500mb of data and a lot of minutes for international calling. $10 per day may seem acceptable for a weeks vacation, costing only $70 for the phone plan, but when you are cruising here for months, $10 per day becomes too expensive.
The alternative is to get a local SIM card and plug it into your phone! BTC, the local cell phone carrier sells SIM cards that will give you data and minutes with a prepaid plan. The cards cost about $20 to start with a modest plan of several minutes and GB of data. Over the phone, or with the BTC app, you can add minutes and data to your phone as you use it up.
The system works quite well. Through the BTC app, you can add money to your account from your credit card. After you have added the funds, you can then dial *203# to access the BTC options. The call will take you through several prompts where you can choose to buy minutes or data at various dollar values.
Since we do a lot of uploading with our YouTube channel, we have opted for the most expensive but also largest data plan, where you can buy 15GB of data for only $35. This data is consumed both in upload as well as in downloads, so use it wisely! As the data gets low, simply add more money and then call *203# to add more data to your phone card.
All of this is possible only if you have an unlocked phone that you purchased directly from the manufacturer. If your phone came as part of a contract with your carrier, you will not be able to switch out the SIM card with a BTC card. In that case, you can buy a prepaid cell phone here and simply add minutes or data to that phone while you are here.
The coolest thing about a new SIM card is it gives you a local Bahamas phone number!
