Update: EU roaming charges are not quite a thing of the past

Isnt the real point of this Convo resting on Article 50 and then two years of Brexit negotiations as checking on Vodaphone/BT etc they wont commit to saying the charges will stay as per the EU after the full Brexit. So to me, there is no “jumping for joy ” at the drop in charges which are ,in any case just like the charges applied when you dont have unlimited downloads ie- there is a time limit . Kyriakos a lawyer for Herbert Smith Freehills says to Bloomberg -the charges could be reinstated and that it will be down to the agreement reached by TM when it leaves the EU . If the UK leaves and is outside the EU AND the EEA , the regulations will not be automatically applied in the UK . So to me this is like complaining of toothache, taking an Aspro -pain goes –but later it comes back .

Yes, this could get complicated by the EU exit process, but the government could declare that UK citizens will enjoy the same facilities and T&C’s as those in continental countries and direct Ofcom to make that happen. The government will be desperately looking for ways to make Brexit palatable to a lot of people who will be disadvantaged and this is an easy one.

There is more than one way of making a telephone call and when I last looked they still had landlines in the rest of Europe. Landline calls could be more economical than mobile calls but it would be advisable to check first. Landline calls from hotels are unlikely to be cheaper, but again – it’s worth checking. That won’t help with keeping up-to-date on social media though, but some sacrifices are worth making.

EE has said it will comply with the change in charges from June 2017 . While it is well advertised that in the interim that a cap has been put on operators calls and a cap on roaming charges which are small /minute . Calls will go down from approx= 16p/minute to 4.4p/minute as will smartphone calls . But contrary to what is said by the big phone companies roaming charges are levied on top of the cost of a UK call ,so a call from Madrid to Manchester for 5 minutes of your calls allowance is used PLUS you pay a top-up rate of 4.4p -a total of 22p to the UK operator . There are other charges relating to Pay-as-you Go which are expensive. The UK is still in Europe,as we speak .

It’s all a bit familiar. “Let’s make it as complex as possible a la power industry to confuse the consumers.”

Well that’s what has been achieved. What I’d like to see is genuine removal of roaming charges so that if I have a package deal that gives me 500 mins calls, unlimited texts and 5 GB data a month, it should be valid anywhere in the EU.

But the EU is incapable of getting anything right which is why we are leaving.

Have to say everywhere you go today you young and some not so young with mobile phones stuck in the ear or they are texting, it has become an epidemic. Since I retired I have blown my phone out of the window, when I go on holiday it does not get switched on for a week, it is blissful. For some reason I seem to survive I just don’t how but I do. At the end of the day I suppose I am one person the mobile phone companies will never make money out of, leave that to business and the young.

I don’t wish to publicise a particular mobile provider but I’m with 3 (Three) and we get all our minutes, texts AND data up to our monthly limit weather in UK or Europe. In fact we spend nearly six months in France (in three trips) and it works fine for us.
What will happen on Brexit we will have to wait and see!

More importantly, we should be pushing the phone companies to guarantee no roaming charges for UK customers if we leave the EU. We could find ourselves paying roaming charges at the rate fixed for non EU states.

If the companies do not agree then it may be possible to buy a pay as you go phone from an EU country (Ireland for example) and use that when on trips to Europe.

The dual SIM card phone is the route I took – phones that take two cards are now widely available at similar prices to those with only one card. Both my SIM cards are PAYG, one for UK and one for Cyprus, so no nasty bill surprises. Additionally, if I am in a third country and wish to make a call, I can choose to make it with the SIM that has the lowest charges – almost invariably the Cyprus card!

On arrival at my departure airport for a 11day holiday after checking in my baggage I was handed a letter with my name on but no date saying my accomadation was not available although this had been confirmed in February 2017
the letter stated we could have fourty pound compensation each or cancel the holiday which had been paid for by credit card
What are my options our holiday was totally ruined was not of our choice did not meet the specification we had booked plus on arrival at the destination airport we had to endure over a two hour wait before being told to try out the accomadation the company had provided

Having checked in manually we arrived at gate 12 we waited 10 hours before being told our flight was ‘Cancelled’ and instructed to ‘Go home’. The queue for BA Information was endless so we didn’t try to retrieve our checked luggage. By that time we were exhausted. No tannoy announcements were made at any time – only a couple of enterprising BA staff stood on a desk and shouted into the crowd (now dense as no planes were relieving the build up in Departures.) We were supposed to be flying to Rome to join a Cruise ship which sailed at 6pm and although our tour operators tried to see if they could get us on any flight at all – by any carrier – to catch up with the boat at any port en-route, their efforts were all to no avail. There was no possibility of joining the cruise and so our holiday was aborted.
It was a thoroughly unpleasant experience made worse by no communication at all from BA.

Beware the Faroe islands. I discovered the hard way last week that, despite the Denmark connection, they are NOT in the EU.