[...] some of Europe's blockbuster sights, such as the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Colosseum in Rome, allow you to buy tickets and have them sent to your phone - enabling you to skip the formidable lines when you get there. Besides managing the nitty-gritty details, you can enhance sightseeing with audio tours and podcasts. [...] confirm that your phone will work internationally. Find out your service provider's global roaming rates for voice calls, text messaging and data roaming and tell them which of those services you'd like to activate. Data roaming, accessing the Internet over a cellular connection, is handy when you can't find usable Wi-Fi. On some phones, you can select which specific apps can use data roaming; to reduce usage, check your phone's settings to be sure that none of your apps are set to "use cellular data." Because there are various ways to accidentally burn through data, I like the safeguard of manually turning off data roaming on my phone whenever I'm not actively using it - try checking under your phone's "cellular" or "network" menu, or ask your service provider how to do it.