I received my bill for October 2018 airtime with extra charge for one call of 60 min for £81.60 to an EU country from the UK. I accept my fault for not checking that those calls would not come out of my tariff allowance (although if I was in an EU country and called the UK number, I would be charged £0, madness!!!) but for £81.60 I could fly from the UK to another EU country, stay overnight in a hotel, have a day long chat face to face, and fly back. £81.60 for an hour call is nothing but extortionate and feels more like punishment for making the call than a reasonable charge for such service. I could appreciate such charges 15 or 20 years ago when using a mobile phone but not in this day and age. I appreciate that I did not purchase a bolt on for making international calls, and I could understand if O2 were to punish me for the lack of such bolt on, which costs £5 per month if purchased in advance of calls abroad, and charge me double that for my lack of forward thinking, in addition to O2 charges for such calls with Bolt-on, which are at present 5p/minute. I do not comprehend however how O2 can facilitate calls abroad with the said £5 bolt-on for 5 pence a minute but perceives it to be fair to charge someone 27 times higher tariff for a minute call without the £5 Bolt-on. I find this totally unreasonable. I tried to reason with the help-line staff to no avail. I've now made another attempt to appear to O2 better nature (it worked once before on another issue, so fingers crossed) and I've made a formal complaint, hoping for common sense to prevail. If I have to pay this charge, I've already checked and if we switched all contracts currently held with O2 within my household to another provider, I can recoup that charge within a month or two, so I will get my money back somehow. This however leaves a very bitter taste, how a provider can apply such extortionate and totally unreasonable charges to a loyal customer (I've been with O2 since the first mobile phone I had, and that was probably more then 15 years ago).
