Customer Experiences    From Sweden to Shanghai

Katrin Romare

Katrin Romare

“Calling cards are crap. All I would get is 20 minutes and then the card was out of money.” For the last six years, designer Katrin Romare, founders of Alice&Sens has divided her time between her two homes in Shanghai and Stockholm, Sweden, and knew there had to be a better way to call international calls. When a friend told her about Rebtel, the answer seemed obvious. “I was in the middle of an important call to one of my factories and the calling card ran out of money. I remembered Rebtel and went straight to the site and created an account. I was amazed that I could do it so quickly and that the site was so easy to use even though I was a bit stressed. Now I recommend the service to everyone I know who calls abroad.”

Katrin isn’t the only one who loves the service - her retailers and factories do too. Now they don’t need to pay for international calls and Katrin doesn´t need to worry about being out of touch. “They only use their local number and don’t have to think about whether I’m in the office in Stockholm or in Shanghai. Rebtel means people can always reach me, no matter where I am.”

Mattias Erlandsson

Mattias Erlandsson

“I wanted to improve my Chinese and Shanghai seemed to be the most exciting city in China to do that” says Mattias Erlandsson of his first visit to Shanghai over ten years ago. And when he returned to Sweden to complete his degree, he couldn’t get the city out of his head. “SAS airlines opened up a direct line to Shanghai and I just felt that I had to go back. The city overwhelmed me, and the moment I got off the plane I knew I was here to stay.”

That was in 2004, and Mattias has been living and working here ever since. Asked if he will stay in Shanghai forever he replies, “Forever is a very definite word… but I have no plans to move back.”

Shanghai has changed greatly since Mattias moved here. The city’s international population has grown quickly in the last few years and today there is a large and thriving Swedish community living here. “The contrast between the Chinese and the international atmosphere is amazing,” says Mattias. “It is quite an experience to sit here in a bar Shanghai with a bunch of European football fans and watch Euro 2008!”

Mattias first used Rebtel a few months ago and has been a regular user ever since. He thinks the service is terrific: “I was surprised that the calling quality was so good, especially incoming calls. It’s so much easier than calling from a computer and of course so much cheaper than a normal call. Now I am using my own phone to call home again.”

The only problem is that with Rebtel calls being so cheap, his mum now calls him all the time. “She likes to keep in contact, but every day is a bit overkill,” he laughs.