School summer holidays are fast-approaching, which means that so is the peak time of year for UK residents travelling abroad.
Every year, a proportion of travellers are unfortunately hit with unexpectedly high mobile phone bills. To minimise your risk, take a few moments to familiarise yourself with the following tips:
Before you leave home
- Understand your data allowance. Check what your daily or monthly limit is, and know where to check on your handset, how much you have used.
- Check with your provider whether the country or countries that you’re travelling to are included in your current tariff or within their listed travel zones. Add on the appropriate travel bolt-on if not already in place. It will usually have a daily fee, but is a known cost that is relatively small.
- Before you travel, and whilst connected to WiFi, download any videos, playlists, podcasts etc, that you want to access whilst away.
- If you’re travelling to a country that isn’t included in one of your network’s travel zones and you’re going to need to use data, then consider buying a SIM for the country you are visiting.
Whilst you’re away
- Use WiFi wherever possible and switch off data roaming.
- Remember that you don’t need to be actively using your phone, for data to be in use. If the phone is left switched on, in normal mode, applications can be running in the background, continually refreshing and using your data. Similarly, if someone sends you a text or an email and your phone automatically downloads that, you’ll be billed for it.
- If you can’t avoid using data roaming, avoid heavy-use activities such as watching videos, uploading photos to social media, downloading music or opening email attachments.
- Be particularly careful when in transit, especially by sea, even when travelling between two places that are included in your tariff. Whilst aboard a ferry or cruise ship your phone will connect to the maritime network. The lack of phone masts means connecting to satellites, which is costly.
HJS Technology provides mobile phone services for businesses, with a choice of networks and a range of handsets available. Talk to us to find out more, or enter your contact details here.