Yahoo Finance Aussie hit with $750 phone bill: ‘I felt absolutely sick’
Jess Clarke copped a massive phone bill after returning from her first big overseas holiday.
Jess Clarke had just boarded a boat in Split, Croatia when she realised something was wrong.
“About 20 minutes in, I felt a bit off, and quickly realised I had left a small wallet on the dock,” Clarke told Yahoo Finance.
“Inside that wallet was a SIM I had purposely bought for the trip, medications, and my passport - so pretty much the last things you’d want to forget.”
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Clarke said she urgently needed to use her phone to contact friends she was seeing in Dubrovnik, work out how to get an emergency passport and touch base with her family - so she decided to turn her phone data back on.
The 25-year-old said she only used her phone for about a week, later finding a local SIM card in Greece. But she was still greeted by a shock bill when she returned home.
“I ended up racking up a phone bill of about $750. I felt absolutely sick when I opened it. I had organised so many things for this trip, and had been saving in the lead-up, so it was deflating to be slammed with this bill,” she said.
“I knew it would be big, but I didn’t think it’d be this big. I was a student at the time, so this bill caused a lot of anxiety. I went on a payment plan to pay it off.”
Travel horror stories
Belong head of product Aaliah Eggins-Bryson said we’d all heard of travel horror stories like Clarke’s, with customers often hit with enormous international roaming bills.
Research from the telco found more than half of Aussies were planning to travel overseas in the next 12 months.
Half of Aussies said disconnection was a concern for them when travelling abroad, with many hoping to use social media (54 per cent), texts (48 per cent), phone calls (41 per cent) and email (35 per cent) to stay connected.
How to avoid bill shock
If you want to avoid a travel horror story, Eggins-Bryson said it was important to plan ahead.
Some of your options to stay connected include buying a global roaming pack, a prepaid travel SIM, a local SIM card, or relying on free Wi-Fi.
If you decided to get an international roaming plan, Eggins-Bryson recommended looking for one that was pre-paid or where you paid up front.
“When data is charged in per-megabyte increments, it makes it really hard to control your spend. Some mobile providers offer both so it’s best to check before you go overseas and start racking up a massive bill,” she said.
Here are her top tips to avoid bill shock
Plan ahead - do your research and pre-plan and pre-book as much as you can
Have a budget - this can help you avoid ending up with an enormous roaming bill
Pay attention to usage alerts - these are text messages that remind you how much you have spent or used
Yahoo Finance understands Clarke's travel incident occurred five years ago and is not connected to Telstra or Belong.
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