Voda Data Card User? Check Your Bill

A couple of months back, we raved about Vodafone’s new flat-rate tariff for using your 3G data card in around 40 countries. £8.50 for any 24-hour period of use, (with a 50MB/day fair usage cap), sounded fantastic to us. So we used the card with alacrity while on a press trip in Prague, only to come back to a bill for £115.68, plus VAT. A quick phone call was enough for Vodafone to realise the error of its ways and credit us with the overcharged amount.
Fast forward a few weeks, and the next data card bill arrives, this time including four days’ use at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. So that’s four lots of £8.50, which makes £34. Er, no. This time round, the bill is for £144, including £119.44 for the data used while aborad. So another phone call, another admission from Vodafone that the bill is wrong, and a promise once again to credit the overcharged amount of around £85.
I think it’s appalling that a network of Vodafone’s size can’t get something as simple as a bill right on two consecutive months. More to the point though, I dread to think how many people there are who have been using data cards abroad for years for work, so don’t notice anything untoward in a bill of this size and pay it without question.
The man in the call centre assured me that my concerns were unfounded and that these were isolated incidents, but as I pointed out to him, I’ve only used my data card abroad on two occasions (several times on each) since the flat-rate data roaming tariff was introduced, and each time, I’ve been overcharged.
So I end this rant with two pleas. The first is to anyone with a Vodafone data card who has used it abroad in the past couple of months, or who plans to in the future, to check their bills when they arrive to make sure that they have not been overcharged for use in any of the countries covered by the flat-rate tariff.
The second is to Vodafone, which should, as a matter of urgency, check all the data card bills it has issued since the flat-rate roaming tariff was introduced, and immediately credit all those customers who have been overcharged.

David Murphy
Editor