If You're Headed To . . . Barcelona, Spain
The Casa Camper hotel (www.camper.com) fuses high tech and high touch, with free Wi-Fi, an LCD TV in every room, and a German water-recycling system that uses grease-eating bacteria to clean used shower water for its toilets. If you can't afford Camper's $270-per-night rates, the Aparthotel Silver (www.hotelsilver.com) has kitchens in every room, a free PC in the lobby, Wi-Fi on three floors, and good, old-fashioned family-style service for only $100 a night. Point your cell phone to wap.tmb.net for maps and public-transit directions to anywhere in the city. ? next: Roaming Pains

Roaming Pains

For an international roaming death match, I had five different cell-phone solutions face off: Cingular and T-Mobile subscriptions from the U.S.; Vodafone and Explorer SIM cards purchased through www.telestial.com; and a "Happy Mobile" SIM Card purchased at a Phone House store in Barcelona.

The T-Mobile SIM made calls for 99 cents a minute on the first try, but data service required half an hour on the phone with tech support, and the rates were terrifying: $15 per MB. The Cingular card didn't work at all for the first day because of "provisioning problems," and its rates are even higher: $1.29 a minute and $19.50 per MB for data on normal phones. With a $69.99-a-month international BlackBerry plan, though, roaming with Cingular's new BlackBerry 8800 is about as good as it gets for business travelers, and my Black-Berry kept me connected all week.

The other cards are better bets for infrequent travelers who need to make calls, but I couldn't configure data services on any of them. The Explorer card ($49), which gives you an Estonian phone number, worked on the first try. Incoming calls are free and outgoing calls are 60 cents a minute. The Vodafone card ($59) charges less per minute and theoretically offers data, but that required talking to tech support in Spanish, which I don't speak. No va. Happy Mobile was the cheapest?13 for the SIM, including $6.50 in call credit, and local outgoing calls were only 20 cents a minute—but it had no data service and required waiting on line at a store for half an hour.

My conclusion? Local SIMs are the best for cheap, simple calling. Go to Telestial if you don't want to bother standing at a store. And for data, unless your business has an international roaming data plan, just get a subscription for some Wi-Fi hot spots—it'll save you both cost and grief.

Quite a Card

The Sierra Wireless AirCard 875 gives your laptop the ultimate in international connectivity: I got online in Spain at speeds over 300 kilobits per second, with peaks above 650 Kbps. It works also on Cingular's HSDPA high-speed network here at home. Beware the monthly fees, though: An international, 100MB  data plan costs $139.99 a month.