Sometimes, even though you think you are doing the right thing and following all the guide lines and playing by the book you can still get caught out. Those words are very prophetic for me and I am in fact slightly embarrassed even that I fell into the oldest pitfall in the travel book and that is not ensuring your mobile charges were sorted before you use your mobile abroad.
The facts are that before departing for Australia in May i contacted my service provider of some twenty years (Vodafone) and told them exactly what i was doing and for how long, I told them explicitly that i didn't want to come back to huge bills and what could they do for me?.
As I own an iPhone 5 they did seem awfully preoccupied at the time with WiFi and I duly accepted a package that limited me to 25gb and then text-ed me when I had used it at a cost of £5.00.
So off i went for six weeks to the land of plenty and three weeks in I get a text from Vodafone to tell me my bill was now £850+vat and i needed to contact them to ensure I knew about it. Considering my normal bill is 2-300 pounds one would beg to question why the company let it go £150.00 over let alone five or six hundred pounds over and the bill was not high because of Wifi usage but calls, I was getting charged £1.50 per minute for accepting calls and making them to mobiles inside OZ, but there we go you make your own mind's up over that one.
With this news i headed for a Vodafone.au shop and told them of my plight, they recommended a simple Samsung pay as you go phone for $30.00 and away I went. They also said in the shop that my treatment by Vodafone UK was a little harsh considering I had previously rung them to inform them of my whereabouts but again, you make your own minds up.
On landing in Gatwick and arriving home some four hours later I rang Vodafone to ask if they could look at the bill again which was now standing at some £1,200.00. The reception I got was like hitting a brick wall at 70 mph in a bubble car while strapped to the roof rack, definitely a no-no, but as I was reminding them about the fact I HAD been responsible and rung them beforehand the guy on the phone proceeded to then inform me that i should have had my phone unlocked and used an Au. phone Sim, rather closing the stable door after the horse has bolted I thought. Anyway the accounts side of Vodafone rang me back some minutes later and we worked out a simple plan of paying the bill over 3 months which was not ideal as there was no offer of a discount or softening of the blow it was pay up and shut up, it has never been about the ability to pay but the principal. So I agreed to pay for the outstanding over sized bill over 3 months and off we went. Well, no. It doesn't work like that. This is Vodafone.
You see, this is where you need to read the small print on your phone contract, despite paying £40+vat every month plus phone calls and texts on my contract to this greedy bunch of business people and sticking to the agreement put in place I had my phone restricted today, so it only takes incoming calls. This is because even though I had (only 3 days ago) paid this monster of a company £601.50. which was made up of the £390.00 and £210.50 in monthly call charges and contract fees they now decided that they would take up their option under "terms and conditions" and restrict my phone to incoming calls only.
So, as I have said before, make your own minds up about what you are reading. I rang Vodafone to find out why they had done this and even the guy on the other end of the phone could not believe what had happened, he said he had been with the company six years and never seen a customer be treated in this way, so rather than moan at him I requested to speak to a manger as by now even my patience was wearing thin.
I ended up getting a manger who if you cut him through the middle it said "I Love Vodafone" excellent news for this behemoth of a company but curtains for me the humble customer looking to get some sort of conclusion, I swear that if you placed this guy in a capsule and sent him to Mars he would not be lonely as he would be happy arguing with himself all the way there and back.
Despite my protests that I had stuck to my agreement and I had done what they asked Vodafone still retain the right to stop service whenever they like, despite the agreement in place. So I ended up bidding the man good day as he was quite simply a robot with a script and put the phone down, I looked at my iPhone sitting there as a lifeless lump of plastic and went out and bought another £20.00 Samsung with a pay as you go Sim, oh and its an 02 sim as the reception in Shropshire is far superior to Vodafone in any case.
My protest and my little story will make no difference to @Vodafone as they are far too big a company to miss my 2-300 a month but the moral of my story is this, if I as a businessman who takes the time to sort such things out before I go abroad can get caught out then so can anyone, I am not wet behind the ears I thought I had taken all the steps necessary to ensure I didn't get a huge bill and in the end that is exactly what I got, so my advice is to get your phone unlocked and when you get in your Country of preference buy a local Sim card. That is the advice that Vodafone will not give you here because it's handing business to their competition, (their words not mine) so make of that what you will also, the fact I will never use them again and they have lost a good loyal customer will doubtless not lose their MD a seconds sleep, but if nothing else I hope my sobering tale of corporate greed at its most efficient will stop others being quite so foolish as I.
The facts are that before departing for Australia in May i contacted my service provider of some twenty years (Vodafone) and told them exactly what i was doing and for how long, I told them explicitly that i didn't want to come back to huge bills and what could they do for me?.
As I own an iPhone 5 they did seem awfully preoccupied at the time with WiFi and I duly accepted a package that limited me to 25gb and then text-ed me when I had used it at a cost of £5.00.
So off i went for six weeks to the land of plenty and three weeks in I get a text from Vodafone to tell me my bill was now £850+vat and i needed to contact them to ensure I knew about it. Considering my normal bill is 2-300 pounds one would beg to question why the company let it go £150.00 over let alone five or six hundred pounds over and the bill was not high because of Wifi usage but calls, I was getting charged £1.50 per minute for accepting calls and making them to mobiles inside OZ, but there we go you make your own mind's up over that one.
With this news i headed for a Vodafone.au shop and told them of my plight, they recommended a simple Samsung pay as you go phone for $30.00 and away I went. They also said in the shop that my treatment by Vodafone UK was a little harsh considering I had previously rung them to inform them of my whereabouts but again, you make your own minds up.
On landing in Gatwick and arriving home some four hours later I rang Vodafone to ask if they could look at the bill again which was now standing at some £1,200.00. The reception I got was like hitting a brick wall at 70 mph in a bubble car while strapped to the roof rack, definitely a no-no, but as I was reminding them about the fact I HAD been responsible and rung them beforehand the guy on the phone proceeded to then inform me that i should have had my phone unlocked and used an Au. phone Sim, rather closing the stable door after the horse has bolted I thought. Anyway the accounts side of Vodafone rang me back some minutes later and we worked out a simple plan of paying the bill over 3 months which was not ideal as there was no offer of a discount or softening of the blow it was pay up and shut up, it has never been about the ability to pay but the principal. So I agreed to pay for the outstanding over sized bill over 3 months and off we went. Well, no. It doesn't work like that. This is Vodafone.
You see, this is where you need to read the small print on your phone contract, despite paying £40+vat every month plus phone calls and texts on my contract to this greedy bunch of business people and sticking to the agreement put in place I had my phone restricted today, so it only takes incoming calls. This is because even though I had (only 3 days ago) paid this monster of a company £601.50. which was made up of the £390.00 and £210.50 in monthly call charges and contract fees they now decided that they would take up their option under "terms and conditions" and restrict my phone to incoming calls only.
So, as I have said before, make your own minds up about what you are reading. I rang Vodafone to find out why they had done this and even the guy on the other end of the phone could not believe what had happened, he said he had been with the company six years and never seen a customer be treated in this way, so rather than moan at him I requested to speak to a manger as by now even my patience was wearing thin.
I ended up getting a manger who if you cut him through the middle it said "I Love Vodafone" excellent news for this behemoth of a company but curtains for me the humble customer looking to get some sort of conclusion, I swear that if you placed this guy in a capsule and sent him to Mars he would not be lonely as he would be happy arguing with himself all the way there and back.
Despite my protests that I had stuck to my agreement and I had done what they asked Vodafone still retain the right to stop service whenever they like, despite the agreement in place. So I ended up bidding the man good day as he was quite simply a robot with a script and put the phone down, I looked at my iPhone sitting there as a lifeless lump of plastic and went out and bought another £20.00 Samsung with a pay as you go Sim, oh and its an 02 sim as the reception in Shropshire is far superior to Vodafone in any case.
My protest and my little story will make no difference to @Vodafone as they are far too big a company to miss my 2-300 a month but the moral of my story is this, if I as a businessman who takes the time to sort such things out before I go abroad can get caught out then so can anyone, I am not wet behind the ears I thought I had taken all the steps necessary to ensure I didn't get a huge bill and in the end that is exactly what I got, so my advice is to get your phone unlocked and when you get in your Country of preference buy a local Sim card. That is the advice that Vodafone will not give you here because it's handing business to their competition, (their words not mine) so make of that what you will also, the fact I will never use them again and they have lost a good loyal customer will doubtless not lose their MD a seconds sleep, but if nothing else I hope my sobering tale of corporate greed at its most efficient will stop others being quite so foolish as I.
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