How do I keep getting office calls while I'm travelling?

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This is simple when you're travelling domestically and genuinely easy to get wrong when you're travelling internationally, because the cost trap isn't obvious until the bill arrives.

Plain carrier forwarding is one option, and it is free domestically, but it is not the only one. A VoIP business phone app, such as KrispCall's, is another, and for international travel specifically it sidesteps a roaming cost that carrier forwarding does not. Both are covered below so you can pick based on where you are actually travelling.

The domestic case

If you're travelling within your own country, forwarding your office number to your mobile through your carrier's standard call forwarding is free and simple. Set it up before you leave, test it with a real call, and you're covered for the trip.

The roaming trap when travelling abroad

This is the part people miss. When you forward a call to your mobile and you're roaming internationally, many carriers charge you, the person being forwarded to, a roaming rate to receive that forwarded call, even though you didn't place it and didn't do anything except have your phone on. Depending on your carrier and destination, this can add up fast if the office line gets a normal volume of calls while you're away for a week or two. Outgoing calls abroad have a similar trap: seehow to call suppliers abroad without a huge phone bill.

A VoIP business phone app, like KrispCall's mobile app, sidesteps this specific trap because calls to your office number ring the app over Wi-Fi or mobile data rather than through your carrier's voice network. As long as you have internet access, which is far more reliably available and cheap (or free via hotel/venue Wi-Fi) than it used to be, you avoid the carrier roaming charge entirely for receiving those calls.

Step by step

1. Decide who should actually answer while you're away, since it might not need to be you personally for every call. For a team rather than one person, see how tostop missing calls when your team is on the road.
2. If staying domestic, set up carrier call forwarding to your mobile; it's free and simple.
3. If travelling internationally, use a VoIP app instead of carrier forwarding, so you're not paying roaming rates just to receive calls.
4. Test a real call from another country before you actually travel, not after you land, so you catch any setup issue while you can still fix it easily.
5. Set a voicemail backup for the stretches when you're genuinely unreachable, a flight, a meeting, a time zone gap.

What I'd actually tell you

Check your specific carrier's roaming policy on forwarded calls before you assume the worst or the best; policies genuinely vary, and some plans include this at no extra charge while others bill it per minute like any other roaming call. If you're not sure, default to the VoIP app approach for any trip longer than a couple of days, since the downside of guessing wrong on a carrier's forwarding policy is a real bill, while the downside of using the app unnecessarily is basically nothing.

Second point worth being honest about: time zones, not technology, are usually the bigger problem on longer trips. Forwarding a call that arrives at 3am your local time doesn't become a good idea just because the technical setup works. If you're travelling somewhere with a meaningfully different time zone for more than a couple of days, it's worth having someone else cover calls during your actual sleeping hours rather than trying to be reachable around the clock.

When to skip this

If the trip is short and the office genuinely doesn't need a live answer for a day or two, voicemail with a clear "I'm travelling, back on [date]" message, checked once a day, is often simpler and perfectly adequate. Not every absence needs real-time call forwarding.

A worked example: a consultant's two-week trip

Say a solo consultant plans a two-week trip across three countries, with a client base that occasionally needs to reach them for urgent scheduling questions. Setting up carrier call forwarding without checking the roaming policy first, the consultant assumes it'll work the same as it does domestically. Three days in, a handful of forwarded calls have triggered roaming receive charges on top of the consultant's regular data roaming cost, a surprise that only becomes visible once the bill arrives weeks later. Switching to the VoIP app for the remainder of the trip, calls now route over hotel and venue Wi-Fi at no extra per-call cost, and the only real requirement becomes making sure the consultant has a working internet connection at each stop, which in most business travel contexts today is a far more reliable assumption than cellular coverage and roaming agreements ever were.

Common mistakes with travel call forwarding

• Assuming the same setup that works domestically will work the same way abroad. Carrier forwarding behaves differently once roaming enters the picture, and the cost mechanics genuinely aren't obvious until you've actually read your specific plan's international terms.
• Not testing before departure. A forwarding or app setup that technically works from your home country can behave unexpectedly once you're actually on foreign infrastructure; testing from the destination country, or at least researching the specific carrier's documented behavior there, catches problems while you can still fix them easily.
• Trying to stay reachable around the clock across a large time difference. Technology solves the "can the call reach me" problem; it doesn't solve the "should I be answering this at 3am" problem, which is a staffing and expectations question, not a phone-setup one.

Planning for patchy internet

The VoIP approach's one real dependency is a working internet connection, which is usually a safe bet in hotels, offices, and most urban areas, but isn't universal everywhere you might travel. If your itinerary includes stretches with genuinely unreliable internet, a remote job site, a rural area, a long flight, it's worth having a fallback: either accepting standard carrier forwarding (and its roaming cost) for just those specific stretches, or simply letting those windows go to voicemail with a clear message, rather than assuming the app-based approach covers every single hour of a multi-stop trip without gaps.

A quick note on caller experience

From the caller's side, none of this matters as long as the call connects and sounds normal. Worth testing before you travel: have a colleague or friend call the office number and confirm it rings through clearly on the app, with normal call quality, not a choppy connection that makes the caller think something's wrong on their end. A caller who hears a bad connection and hangs up to try again later experiences almost the same outcome as a call that never connected at all, so the technical setup working on your end isn't the whole picture; it has to sound right on theirs too. If you want callers to see a local number, read aboutgetting a UK or Canadian number from abroad.

How I'd approach this

If you travel often and want this handled automatically, calls routing to whoever's actually in the right time zone that day, rather than you manually toggling forwarding before every trip, that's a small, worthwhile custom setup on top of KrispCall's or a similar system's API. I build that kind of automated handoff for clients who travel regularly, and it's a one-time setup rather than something you reconfigure before every trip. Another option isone phone number that reaches whoever is working.