£6400 mobile bill for 6 day honeymoon

[Deleted User]

zagfles said:

[Deleted User] said:

How much do you expect EE to reasonably do?

It took me 30 seconds to find roaming costs for Morocco and I'm not even an EE customer.

Get unlimited minutes, texts and 500MB of data for 24-hours while you’re away. You can only buy roaming passes when you get to the country. We will send you a text when you land.

This service appears to be £7.50 per day, if only you'd taken a minute to check before leaving...

Roaming Costs | Help | EE

So where does that say what the cost is if you don't buy a pass? 

Link on the roaming landing page 

ROAMING CHARGES

Get your roaming costs

We'll show you personalised roaming costs and add-ons.

Log in

zagfles

[Deleted User] said:

zagfles said:

[Deleted User] said:

How much do you expect EE to reasonably do?

It took me 30 seconds to find roaming costs for Morocco and I'm not even an EE customer.

Get unlimited minutes, texts and 500MB of data for 24-hours while you’re away. You can only buy roaming passes when you get to the country. We will send you a text when you land.

This service appears to be £7.50 per day, if only you'd taken a minute to check before leaving...

Roaming Costs | Help | EE

So where does that say what the cost is if you don't buy a pass? 

Link on the roaming landing page 

ROAMING CHARGES

Get your roaming costs

We'll show you personalised roaming costs and add-ons.

Log in

A login link  So roaming costs are "personalised"? Wonder how much the OP was charged?

The roaming plan at 500MB for £7.50 looks reasonable, that'd be 1.5p per MB. So they can clearly buy data from the foreign network for under that sort of price. Perhaps they charge a small markup for not buying a plan in advance? 

Veteransaver

This is always the trouble with contracts Vs PAYG. On payg you'd simply run out of credit.
Charges are part of the contract, but I'm surprised your network provider didn't put a cap on it, it's quite irresponsible to let someone run up a £6k bill (I though it was usual  for networks to notify you at eg £200 that you are running up a big bill.
They haven't done anything wrong necessarily but it's pretty sharp practice. A sudden £6k bill is a life changing sum of money so I can understand why the OP is annoyed.

jbrassy

Don't understand why the OP didn't look up roaming charges before travelling. I thought it was common knowledge that using your phone abroad, especially for data, is expensive. It's fair enough that people want to use their phone abroad, e.g. for using Whatsapp or getting directions on Google Maps. However, they could have got a local SIM card at the airport for €20 which would have given them 20GB of data: https://www.traveltomtom.net/destinations/africa/morocco/sim-card-marrakech

I'm afraid the OP may have to swallow his pride and chalk it up as a lesson learned. Next time, put the phone on airplane mode and take the EE SIM out while you're on the plane, then buy a local SIM at the airport when you arrive. 

Hoenir

Veteransaver said:

They haven't done anything wrong necessarily but it's pretty sharp practice. A sudden £6k bill is a life changing sum of money so I can understand why the OP is annoyed.

Should be annoyed with themselves though. Not passing the blame. A cordial rather than aggressive approach may result in a reduced settlement. 

DE_612183

Hoenir said:

Veteransaver said:

They haven't done anything wrong necessarily but it's pretty sharp practice. A sudden £6k bill is a life changing sum of money so I can understand why the OP is annoyed.

Should be annoyed with themselves though. Not passing the blame. A cordial rather than aggressive approach may result in a reduced settlement. 

This is what I would do - plead ignorance, to busy, on honeymoon, not paying attention, very sorry etc - is there nay thing they can do to reduce the burden for newlyweds...

zagfles

Veteransaver said:

This is always the trouble with contracts Vs PAYG. On payg you'd simply run out of credit.
Charges are part of the contract, but I'm surprised your network provider didn't put a cap on it, it's quite irresponsible to let someone run up a £6k bill (I though it was usual  for networks to notify you at eg £200 that you are running up a big bill.
They haven't done anything wrong necessarily but it's pretty sharp practice. A sudden £6k bill is a life changing sum of money so I can understand why the OP is annoyed.

Yes, as above, anyone can easily get mobile data in Morocco for under £1 a GB. If that's the sort of price an individual can buy for, how much do you think a large UK network could buy it for? Yet some charge stupidly high prices like £5000 per GB. It's clearly an attempt to rip off the careless.

Yeah yeah, should have checked the cost. Wonder how many of the sanctimonious "all your fault - why didn't you check the price" brigade have ever walked into a pub and ordered a drink without checking the bar tariff first. I'm sure if they'd been charged £10,000 for a pint they'd have paid up and said "silly me, my fault, should have checked the price". Because that really is a similar scale of ripoff. 

There used to be a default £45 worldwide cap on roaming costs that users would have take positive action to exceed.

See Mobile roaming in the EU after Brexit - House of Commons Library inc a link back to MSE. 

zagfles

DE_612183 said:

Hoenir said:

Veteransaver said:

They haven't done anything wrong necessarily but it's pretty sharp practice. A sudden £6k bill is a life changing sum of money so I can understand why the OP is annoyed.

Should be annoyed with themselves though. Not passing the blame. A cordial rather than aggressive approach may result in a reduced settlement. 

This is what I would do - plead ignorance, to busy, on honeymoon, not paying attention, very sorry etc - is there nay thing they can do to reduce the burden for newlyweds...

Yup, they'll almost certainly accept a much lower amount, IIRC in similar cases sometimes a small fraction of the bill. 

DullGreyGuy

Veteransaver said:

Charges are part of the contract, but I'm surprised your network provider didn't put a cap on it, it's quite irresponsible to let someone run up a £6k bill (I though it was usual  for networks to notify you at eg £200 that you are running up a big bill.
They haven't done anything wrong necessarily but it's pretty sharp practice. A sudden £6k bill is a life changing sum of money so I can understand why the OP is annoyed.

In recent years every time I've signed up for a new deal its asked me what cap I want and no cap was an option you could select. Obviously dont know when the OP signed up or how but I'd be surprised if it wasnt part of the process of anyone thats got a new deal in the last 4 years. 

If they ask and you say you dont want a cap I can't see how thats irresponsible? Having looked at the roaming charges of 4 different operators, as a result of this thread, all 4 on the pages I looked at on roaming costs recommended putting a cap on. 

The problem of "why dont the just do it for you" well that will be the case when the person has a serious accident whilst abroad unaware that their provider has cut them off and unable to call anyone for help as their provider has decided they spent enough. 

zagfles

DullGreyGuy said:

Veteransaver said:

Charges are part of the contract, but I'm surprised your network provider didn't put a cap on it, it's quite irresponsible to let someone run up a £6k bill (I though it was usual  for networks to notify you at eg £200 that you are running up a big bill.
They haven't done anything wrong necessarily but it's pretty sharp practice. A sudden £6k bill is a life changing sum of money so I can understand why the OP is annoyed.

In recent years every time I've signed up for a new deal its asked me what cap I want and no cap was an option you could select. Obviously dont know when the OP signed up or how but I'd be surprised if it wasnt part of the process of anyone thats got a new deal in the last 4 years. 

If they ask and you say you dont want a cap I can't see how thats irresponsible? Having looked at the roaming charges of 4 different operators, as a result of this thread, all 4 on the pages I looked at on roaming costs recommended putting a cap on. 

The problem of "why dont the just do it for you" well that will be the case when the person has a serious accident whilst abroad unaware that their provider has cut them off and unable to call anyone for help as their provider has decided they spent enough. 

Yeah that was such a big problem before they removed the £45 default cap a couple of years ago. Maybe they should make calls to emergency services free. Oh, hang on...

And maybe using too many double or triple negatives isn't not irresponsible. Why don't you head over the DFW board and tell everyone how irresponsible they are. Or not.