Traps that send bills soaring if you take a mobile on holiday

Roaming charges have been scrapped in the EU — but there are still costly pitfalls

HOLIDAYMAKERS could still be hit with huge bills for using their mobiles in Europe this summer despite a clampdown on charges for phone use abroad, a Money Mail investigation reveals.

New rules introduced last month mean that if you use your mobile phone for calls, texts or browsing the internet while on holiday within the European Union, it will cost the same as it would in the UK. The European Commission pledged to end punitive roaming charges, saying ‘mobile phone users will pay the same price as at home, with no extra charges’.

The ‘roam like at home’ scheme promises to revolutionise the way we take our holidays, with families able to access maps and restaurant reviews, make reservations and check on relatives back at home at no extra cost.

But several clauses leave Britons at risk of hefty bills if they travel to the Continent.

If you use your phone for sat nav or download a film — and exceed your data allowance — you could still find you’re hit with big costs.

And if you take a short flight to a country outside the EU — a day trip to Monaco while holidaying in the South of France, or a ferry to the Channel Islands, for example — you also face big penalties.

Experts also warn that roaming costs remain punishingly high if you’re travelling outside the Euro-pean Union entirely.

Here, we reveal the hidden dangers to watch out for, and how to keep your costs down.

WHY ROAMING USED TO BE SO EXPENSIVE

WHEN you use your phone to call, text or surf the internet away from the UK, you are ‘roaming’. This means your mobile or tablet is using a foreign network.

Your mobile network — Vodafone, EE, O2, Three or whichever you use — has to pay the foreign operator to use their network and this cost is then passed on to you.

But the EU felt the amount opera-tors were charging their customers had got out of hand and did not represent the actual cost. One in ten Britons have returned from their holiday with roaming charges that add up to over £100 more than their typical bill, according to comparison site uSwitch.

The Mail has reported examples of travellers hit with eye-watering bills. NHS worker Shannon Mills, 19, was billed for almost £22,000 by O2 in 2015 after making video calls and using social media during a holiday to Turkey.

Rebecca Bradbury, 25, was left penniless when Orange, which is now part of EE, took almost £1,000 from her bank account in data roaming charges following a two-week trip to Thailand in 2014.

She insisted that Orange had sent her no warning texts to say she had exceeded her data allowance.

PRICE CUT THAT’LL MAKE YOUR TRIP

SINCE June 15 this year, all EU mobile operators have had to offer roaming at domestic prices. Customers do not need to do anything for this to happen.

If you have a phone package which gives you a certain quota of calls, texts and data use each month, your roaming will simply be considered part of this allowance.

When this allowance has been used up, the new rules say you should only be charged your home phone network’s usual domestic rates for extra data, calls or texts.

This could transform the way

ople use their mobiles abroad. Rather than switching off eir phone’s roaming ility, or locking it in safe for the week, K holidaymakers avelling to Italy, ance, Spain and e rest of the EU n use their handt just as they uld at home. t means they can g friends, make deo calls to family, nd work emails, date their status on cebook and upload photoaphs to Instagram without fear. hey can also use their data allowce to use Google Maps, for ample, to find their way around a w city, or work out a driving route to their villa from the airport. Travellers can look up top restaurants online, find out the weather forecast or keep up to date with the news in the knowledge it should not cost them a small fortune. But there are exceptions and people could still be caught out by several little- known loopholes.

DON’T GO MAD WITH DATA USE

YoU can make as many phone calls as you like and send as many texts as you wish from anywhere in the EU and you will be charged domestic prices. And you won’t pay a penny extra for receiving calls or texts while you’re abroad either. But the rules for data — browsing the internet and downloading items — are different. Data is measured in megabytes (MB) and gigabytes (GB) — a gigabyte is equal to 1,000 megabytes.

EU rules state that once you have exceeded a ‘fair’ amount of data, networks can charge you more than the domestic rate.

Even if you have unlimited data included in your contract at home, you could still find yourself paying higher rates above a certain amount of data usage

Three has a cap of 12 GB of data at domestic rates. Any data usage over these limits comes with a surcharge of 0.78 p per MB. EE users can use up to 15 GB. After this, they would need to buy an add-on of 100 MB for 78 p, 500 MB for £3.90 or 1 GB for £7.80. Giffgaff caps some tariffs at just 6GB of data, after which you are charged 0.78 p per MB.

So if you endlessly stream films on holiday when you’re not connected to the hotel’s Wi-Fi, or if you are glued to Google Maps while trying to find museums or attractions, you could find yourself with a big bill.

And the rules haven’t changed for international call rates in the UK. If you use your mobile to call a restaurant in Spain while you’re in the UK, you’ll still have to pay the international charge on top of the call.

If you’re with o2 or Vodafone, for example, a call from the UK to a Spanish number could cost you as much as £1.50 per minute.

BE CAREFUL OF EXTRA CHARGES

ThE new rules on roaming charges only cover European Union members — but a recent study by Carphone Warehouse suggests three- quarters of us are unsure which countries on the European mainland are in the EU.

To add to the confusion, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein, which are outside the EU but part of the European Economic Area (EEA), are included in the deal.

The European destinations most likely to catch you out this summer are Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man — all are in the British Isles but not part of the EU or the EEA.

on the mainland, Switzerland and Monaco are excluded because they’re outside the EU.

Providers such as EE, o2 and Vodafone won’t charge roaming fees to travellers in these countries — but be careful, as some networks will. Three, for example, will continue to charge roaming rates for Monaco, including 10p for every MB of data. Virgin Mobile will charge roaming fees in Switzerland, Guernsey, the Isle of Man and Jersey. iD Mobile, an offshoot of Carphone Warehouse, also charges roaming fees for data in Switzerland. If you travel to Geneva this summer, for example, it will charge £2 per minute to call home, 50p per text and £1.25 for 1 MB of data. Giffgaff charges roaming rates for Switzerland, Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Man and Monaco. Networks have also been less generous to their payas-you-go customers. For example, o2 customers with pay-as-you go SIM cards will be charged roaming rates to use their mobiles in Guernsey, Jersey, the Isle of Man, Monaco and Switzerland. But pay monthly customers can use their usual UK allowance in these countries.

ALERTS THAT SAVE YOU THOUSANDS

UNDER EU guidelines introduced in 2010, mobile operators must apply a cut-off limit once your bill for using data reaches €50 (excluding VAT) — around £44.

Different networks have varied this slightly. o2 caps charges at £40 while Three’s limit is £42.50.

This means providers must send you a text when you reach 80 pc of your agreed roaming cap and another when you actually hit it.

When you’ve used €50 worth of data, the network cuts off your internet connectivity to stop you using any more data — unless you reply ‘YES’ to the text and agree to exceed the data cap.

The €50 data restriction means you may only get two or three minutes into streaming a film before you reach the cap and your provider cuts off your internet access.

however, customers can quickly override this by responding to the text message to say they want to continue using data.

Experts warn that many people don’t realise this means there is no longer any ceiling on the cost of their bill and they could find themselves being legitimately charged data bills that run to thousands of pounds.

Mobile provider iD, for example, charges £ 1.25 per MB for data in Switzerland.

It means someone streaming a film such as Jurassic World would pay £600 to watch all the way through in standard quality (SD) and £2,176 to watch in high definition (hD), if they had overriden the €50 cap, according to research by uSwitch. The film is two hours, four minutes, so customers would end up paying as much as £17.50 per minute.

A Virgin Mobile customer visiting Jersey this summer will be charged 50 p per MB of data.

By opting out of the €50 roaming cap they risk racking up a bill of almost £900 to watch a single film. If they chose to watch Jurassic World they would pay £240 in standard definition or more than £870 in high definition.

Virgin Mobile says customers should consider ‘carefully’ before lifting the data cap, which ‘is there to protect them from running up large bills’.

A spokesman for iD Mobile said its customers could set their own cap to above or below its £41 automatic limit, or could call the network to block roaming altogether.

Ernest Doku of uSwitch says: ‘The cost of data can be high per megabyte, so it doesn’t take much to reach your cap if you have one.

‘our advice to consumers is not to remove the cap. Where possible, use Wi-Fi and download music and useful local maps before you travel.’