Roaming holiday without the bills

GO SAVE:Worried about how much using your mobile phone on holiday is going to cost? CONOR POPEsuggests ways to avoid 'Bill Shock' on your return

AS MOBILE phones have become smarter, many people have grown more dependent on them and no matter where they are in the world reach for their mobiles to check e-mails, find out the weather forecast or download guidebooks.

It is all so simple and easy until you get home, open your phone bill and realise that the “free” app, which offered you a fascinating guide through the mazy streets of Buenos Aires, actually cost you half the price of your holiday to download once the data roaming charges were factored in. There are, however, ways you can avoid this “Bill Shock”.

Until very recently, mobile phone operators were able to charge ridiculous amounts for calls made and received the moment you stepped off this island – or indeed crossed the Border into Northern Ireland.

The situation meant that people using the Vodafone network in Spain, for example, could find themselves being asked to pay more than 500 per cent more than when they used the same network at home.

The good news is that the European Commission has, over the past five years, softened the coughs of the operators and put caps on the amounts they can charge for calls, texts and, more recently, data.

Because of these interventions, the maximum your operator can bill you to make or receive a call when in another EU country has fallen dramatically. The price of calls made while abroad within the EU is 35 cent per minute (ex-VAT), while the cost of calls received is now 11 cent per minute.

Receiving a voicemail message while roaming will be free, but consumers will be charged 11 cent per message sent. These changes represent a fall of nearly 70 per cent compared with six years ago.

The cost of roaming outside the EU remains unregulated, however, and people can still be charged as much as €2 a minute to make or receive a call.

Then there is “data roaming” – surfing the internet or checking e-mails – which, if done carelessly, can lead to truly eye-watering bills.

Downloading a photograph of just two megabytes while in the US could cost more than €20, while downloading a four-minute song could cost twice as much again.

Phones which automatically download e-mails and update applications, meanwhile, can quickly lead to what is called “Bill Shock”.

The European Commission has placed a cap of €50 a month on data roaming charges within the EU, but again there are no rules covering this elsewhere.

Here are a few tips which could save you money:

Select your network

While abroad your phone is almost certainly automatically configured to select the network you use, but it may not be the cheapest option.

Before you travel, contact your operator to see which is the cheapest network for you to use in the country you are visiting and then change the settings on your phone to allow you manually select that network.

Your phone manual will guide you through the process or, if you’ve long since binned that, call your operator’s customer care centre and have it take you through it.

Save by signing up

Sign up to any money-saving schemes your operator has. Vodafone, for example, operates two distinct roaming systems – Passport and World. The default option is World, which is the most expensive one. Passport is not available in every country in the world but can be accessed throughout Europe, Australian, New Zealand and Japan.

In Australia, for example, someone who has signed up to Passport pays the same per minute charge as at home to make a call, plus a 79 cent connection fee, and 79 cent a minute to receive one. Someone on World will pay €1.99 a minute to both make and receive calls.

Get a local SIM

If you travel frequently to the same country it may be worthwhile buying a local SIM card. Your number will change while you are away, but you will pay local rates for outgoing calls, and while calls home will be charged at international rates, it will be cheaper than roaming.

Use Wi-Fi

Make sure you switch off data roaming on your smartphone before you travel. To be fair to the operators, this does tend to be the default setting. If you must check your e-mails or go online to see how Kate Middleton is getting on this week, connect via a local Wi-Fi network. In many hotels and cafes, Wi-Fi access is free and even if isn’t, it will work out a lot cheaper than carelessly using your 3G network to download data.

Net savings

Internet telephony is giving the operators nightmares, hardly surprising because it is threatening to kill their cash cow by allowing people to make calls for free no matter where they are in the world.

When it comes to freebies, Skype is the mothership. People with the Skype app can make free Skype-to-Skype calls to anywhere in the world and make calls to regular numbers at greatly reduced rates once they have access to a Wi-Fi network.

Viber is arguably an even more impressive development.The app – which is free – allows people to make free calls and send free texts to anyone else who also has the app, no matter where you are and the sound quality is crystal clear. You don’t have to be in a Wi-Fi zone, although do remember that if you’re not, you are sending data which could drive up the costs dramatically without you even being aware of it.

Let them call you

If you need to talk to people, get them to call you. Although you still have to pay to receive calls when roaming, it’s usually much cheaper than making calls yourself. And instead of talking, text. While it does cost money to send texts from abroad, receiving them is free.

Disconnect

Leave your phone at home? Okay, now that’s just being ridiculous.