My son "accidentally" called his girlfriend while we were on JVD and we did get charged a roaming fee. STJ was no problem, but BVI seems to be a charged call. Sorry - don't remember anything about how much, just know we saw him on the phone and stopped the conversation quickly!

Unless you can get to the AT&T tower on St. John you will be get a roaming charge. I believe it's $3.50/min.

We sometimes inadvertently reach a BVI tower from the East End of STT and get a roaming charge....so far AT&T has removed the charge.

F.I.

We called AT&T and we can get a international roam rate of 1.99/min for a monthly charge of 5.99. So, I guess that is our best bet. Better than the 3.49 rate which it would regularly cost. It is just good to know we can make a call. We need to reach our rental agent on St John while we are there. And we want to be able to be reached by family in case of an emergency.
Thanks for you help and advice 🙂

Any time we drove over to the East side of St John or went to BVI Sprint very nicely sent us a text message indicating that if we used the phone we would be charged $3.49 per minute. Now comes the kick in the ass. When we got home and received our cell phone bill it showed charges for each of those messages. Sounds like a bit of a scam to me.

Good to know! I wouldn't be surprised, Sprint has been known to be a little cagey. Thanks for the information. I will turn my sprint phone off when I am in the BVI or around coral bay.

ATT & Sprint work well in BVI for a PRICE. You will be charged international roaming and since the signal is stronger in BVI vs St. John and STT east end, not unusual to have that happen. there as well. Your best bet to avoid the charges, call or text customer service with your company and have them reverse the erroneous charges.

BVI Boat Phone is notorious for taking over cell reception in many areas, for example the Peterborg area of St Thomas and parts of the eastern end of St John. It used to be that you could get pretty good reception off of St Thomas towers on Jost Van Dyke and the western end of Tortola, but I have heard that BVI Boat Phone has beefed up their coverage to prevent this. Best thing is to check if you are roaming or not.

We have been successful in getting the AT&T tower on St. John from West End Tortola & Norman Island.

We now use our computer (with Yahoo Voice) when at any BVI marina (or other free wifi area) to make our calls.........$0.01 per minute....just a thought if you're bringing a computer.

F.I.

Great idea!!! We will bring our lap top. Thanks F.I. All the marinas have free wi-fi?

I don't know if all of the marinas have free wifi....but the ones we were at did.....

BVI Yacht Charters (Road Town, Tortola)
Sunsail Charters (Tortola)
The Moorings (Road Town, Tortola)
Pusser's (West End ,Tortola)
Marina Caye
Bitter End (Virgin Gorda)
Norman Island (AT&T off of the St. John Tower)

Hope this helps...

F.I.

I have gotten the AT&T tower on STJ on both Tortola (I was only at customs) and Jost Van Dyke (all over Jost). There were no additional charges on my bill.

If you take your lap top, you can get Skype. The phones are relatively cheap (paid $29.95 at local store - Best Buy, Radio Shack, etc.) and the calls are free to another skype phone or .02 cents a minute anyplace in the world. We travel allot and have to talk to work and grandkids daily so this works great for us. You can download a skype account for free I think and then just put minutes in to be used as you need them.

Good luck. Our Verizon phones worked well on St. John 2 years ago but the roaming costs were high. This is truly the cheapest way to go.

Have fun !