Going on holiday is a time for extravagance. Staying in a nice hotel, being waited on hand and foot, not concerning yourself with cooking but always eating out: they are certainly well worth every penny painstakingly put aside for the trip.
There are irritations, however, that force those saved pennies to deteriorate at an unnerving rate. One of these is the use of your mobile phone, a device without which we might well find ourselves panicking about being out of contact, or concerning ourselves with having to plan everything without the possibility of making last minute changes. A choice has to be made, though: whether to take the phone on holiday with you and watch as your online bank statement crumbles away, or leave it behind and risk telecommunication isolation.
This extra tariff, known as a ‘roaming charge’, wildly differs depending on where you are visiting, where you are calling, and, in the case of messages, whether they’re text messages, picture messages, video messages, etc. The different charges and categories the networks have on their web pages are endless, but, speaking in generalities, a Pay As You Go customer for many of the major British services would expect to pay something in the region of £1/min when making a call anywhere in Europe, slightly less to phone back to the UK; this in turn shoots up to a tottering £1.50/min if they are travelling anywhere else in the world.
Text message prices vary across the networks more than call charges, with some charging 30p or 50p (Europe and rest of world respectively), and a few even requiring the customer to pay when they receive a message. It costs Pay Monthly customers circa 70p/min to call within Europe, with a smaller 37.2p/min charge to call back to the UK, but they can be charged anything between 85p/min and £1.75/min outside of the continent, depending on location and network disparities.
Thankfully, for one network at least, roaming charges will be a thing of the past by the summer. Vodafone customers will be able to use their mobile phones abroad at a normal rate, so making a call or sending a text will no longer force you to think twice. In a society of increasingly efficient ways of communicating with people around the globe, with landline calls to Australia costing as little as 1p/min, it makes all the sense in the world to get rid of roaming charges. They only result in fewer network customers using their phones abroad, and there is no question that the service providers will make a profit from the increased number of clients calling and texting to tell their friends how beautiful the Mediterranean looks this morning. And the following morning. And every morning until the end of the holiday. |
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