Network roaming incentives: Who offers what?

Holiday season is almost here, which used to mean a huge phone bill in a couple of months time when all those quick calls and messages catch up with you. That bill isn’t always the case these days though.

Some networks such as Three now offer free roaming to many countries while others charge a flat daily fee like Vodafone, which announced its WorldTraveller add on earlier this week. Here are some of the incentives offered by the networks if you travel a lot.

Three

Three offers its Feel At Home incentive to all its customers, whether you are Pay Monthly or Pay As You Go and it doesn’t matter what device you are using either.

There are 16 destinations included in the incentive comprising Australia, Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Macau, Norway, Republic of Ireland, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland and the USA.

Feel At Home will allow you to use your phone as you would in the UK, but if you have All-You-Can-Eat data, texts and minutes then only up to 25GB, 5000 texts and 3000 minutes are included in the incentive for no extra charge.

It’s worth noting that to benfit from Feel At Home, you need to have been a Three customer for more than 30 days and if you are a Pay As You Go customer, you need to convert your credit into an Add-on.

Vodafone

Vodafone offers a few services under its umbrella for Pay Monthly customers but not Pay As You Go users, including EuroTraveller, WorldTraveller and Data Traveller but unlike Three, you will pay an extra daily charge.

The EuroTraveller option will cost you £2 a day up until 31 August after which it will switch to £3 a day, but you will be able to use your UK minutes, texts and data in the Europe Zone which includes over 40 countries.

Vodafone’s WorldTraveller is for those travelling a little further afield and it will cost you £5 a day to use your phone as normal in countries such as Australia, India, New Zealand and the USA.

If it is data you are after then you might want to opt in for the Data Traveller service before you board the plane as this will give you 25MB every day for £5 a day, when you are in countries outside the Europe Zone but in Vodafone’s Rest of World Zone.

O2

If you are travelling in Europe then O2 offers O2 Travel to Pay Monthly and Pay As You Go customers but they vary in terms of cost and allowances.

For Pay Monthly, you can use unlimited data for £1.99 a day and you will be charged a connection fee for 50p for making and receiving calls between the UK and European countries, but after that you can talk for free for up to 60 minutes.

When it comes to text messages, the O2 Travel incentive will allow Pay Monthly customers to receive messages for free but you will have to pay 5p for every texts you send, meaning you would probably be better off using a service such as WhatsApp.

If you are a Pay As You Go O2 customer, you will be charged £1.99 for data with a limit of 50MB a day, while calls will cost 18p per minute to make, 4p a minute to receive and 5p a text message to send.

If you are going further afield than Europe, O2 also offer bolt-ons but it will cost you a little more than Vodafone and Three’s options.

EE

EE also offer a range of add-ons that could help you save money while you are abroad, but again, they are in a different format than the Vodafone and Three options.

There are Talk & Text add ons for example, such as ’120 Roaming Minutes – Global’, that will allow you to make or receive 120 minutes worth of calls anywhere in the world to the UK for £20 a month rolling contract, or £6 a month for 30 minutes.

Texts will cost you £6 a month rolling contract for 100 roaming texts, or £10 a month for 250 roaming texts.

When it comes to data, it depends which zone you are travelling in and for how long for so it is worth going on the EE website to work out your best option.

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Network roaming incentives: Who offers what?