How do I avoid accidental roaming?

[Roy2511]

My wife and I both have newly obtained phones on O2 Pay Monthly, and we recently went on a cruise in the Med. Everywhere we docked was in the EU, so we expected this to be covered.

However, she was charged an extra £54 for data, tripling her monthly charge, and I was charged an extra £16, likewise for data.

This turns out to be because the ship sailed through the range of Morocco and Turkey, and even though we never used our phones while in these areas, we incurred these costs.

Presumably from something the phones were doing in the background. £54 buys you about five megabytes, so thank goodness it wasn’t an OS update going on…

We've been round the world, twice, in earlier years, and never paid a penny more than we expected for phone charges while doing that, so this is a bit of an unwelcome shock 😢

It looks like if we had realised anything like this was going to happen, we should both have texted TRAVEL to wherever you text it, which would have capped the Turkey charges to £6,

but even TRAVEL does not apply to Morocco.

So question one is what should we have done to avoid such charges? Ideally short of switching off the phones altogether, and ideally something we could do in advance, rather than as we entered these zones? Bearing in mind that we never docked in either zone, just sailed through them?

And question two is can we persuade O2 to drop these charges, or at least commute them to £6 each?

[madasaf1sh · Accepted solution]

@Roy2511 

o2 wont drop the charges, as they are legitimate charges, and its your responsibility to ensure your phone doesn't accidentally roam onto networks in Turkey or Morocco. 

The only ways to stop accidental roaming are:

1. Set the Network Selection to manual and then select a network in each port of call, this will however stop all call, texts and data from working until you select a new network. 

2. Make sure Mobile Data is off, including any apps that use background data when it cant connect to WiFi, and just use the Ship's WiFi Service. 

[Roy2511]

Thanks @madasaf1sh 

We’ll take those considerations into account when we next go roaming in the Med, in October.

AAMOI, do we happen to know if the Turks charge O2 precisely the same amount for our roaming, whether or not we have the TRAVEL deal set up?

[madasaf1sh]

@Roy2511 

I would expect so, its just that o2 are charging £6 per day if you use 1Kb or 100Mb...  Where as you pay as you pay.. 

But both the Turkish Network and o2 (same as all networks) will have an uplift in charges..