Vodafone Passport, excellent, except when you get voicemail
Got into Barcelona and thought I should phone my other half to let her know my status.
Vodafone Passport is pretty neat. 75p per connection and international calls are then made at your standard service plan rates. Really good if you’re making 20 minute calls. But they get you on the quick 20 second calls that you’re used to making when you’re back home.
And there’s a fair use policy:
For each call you receive that lasts more than 60 minutes, a 20p per minute charge applies from the 60th minute onwards. This is charged in per second increments.
So this was my first actual experience of Vodafone Passport. I sent a text message to her to check if she was available to receive a call.
Got a reply back saying yes.
I phoned her.
Voicemail.
Shit.
75p for caling her voicemail.
COME ON!
Then she called me.
Arse. 75p again.
So that’s 150p blown. Still, the clarity was brilliant and I felt I was able to relax on the call, rather than stressing at T-Mobile 55p/min rates.
What’s your experience with Vodafone Passport?
Rather the same. It’s interesting in a way. Because in past years I’ve gotten used to preposterous roaming rates, now I find that I’m very used to 30-second conversations while roaming. Passport is good this way, it allows one to relax, as you said, and actually talk, not keep counting seconds.
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Posted by Vlad on March 18th, 2008 at 8:50 pm.A man of your means…stop counting yer pennies at every opportunity. Ye Gods man!! tis true what they say ’bout you Scots. Get a SKYPE Spanish number for £10 with calls transferred through to your mobile costs price of a local call…or something like that.There’s a solution there somewhere? I stand to be corrected! Not much good at reading the smaller detail…!
Posted by Mark on March 18th, 2008 at 10:51 pm.Ewan, as someone who started off travelling extensively from Sydney to London, and now travels extensively from London to Europe, I can say I have saved literally thousands and thousands of pounds by being on passport.
Their 75p flag fall tariff makes them money for calls under 2 minutes (as you saw), but for normal business usage where the inbound roaming charge for someone calling you is £3/minute, the 75p charge is insignificant for 5-30 minute business calls.
Vodafone have been the pioneers of make roaming affordable with passport - hats off to them.
If you travel a lot to Vodafone countries, then I think as your second and third month bills come in you will be thankful you’re on passport - but make sure passport is on the account - don’t assume it is activated. Call 191 and get them to verify it is. 3 weeks after transferred my VF pre-pay to a pos-pay account when I arrived in London to live, passport was mysteriously removed due to “an incompatible product on the network†and I only found out when I checked my bills and they were charging me non-passport roaming rates – so be vigilant when you review your first few bills.
Expert Tip: always manually select the Vodafone network when you get off the plane/train in a new country – if you rely on the automated service then if the VF network drops and you roam onto another network – then you won’t be charged the passport rate.
Apart from that – if you travel anywhere Vodafone has coverage and you don’t have passport on your account, please send me a cheque for £8,000 because you don’t need the money.
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Posted by Andrew Grill on March 18th, 2008 at 11:41 pm.I travel to the Czech Republic every month for 2 weeks each time. The country is covered by Vodafone’s Passport so I take advantage of it in the following way:
Because I expect to receive calls often which are short in duration (less than 2 minutes) I manually select one of the local operators (T-Mobile or O2) and keep it fixed to one of those operators. This allows me to receive calls and be charged the maximum rate of about 20p per minute to receive calls when roaming in the EU.
This is excellent for calls up to about 4 minutes.
Now, when making calls (and having confirmed the recipient will be available) I switch it over to Vodafone Passport where I can enjoy the rate of 75p per call.
This works fine for me, cheap(ish) inbound calls, cheap(ish) outbound calls.
Posted by Loni Avraamides on March 19th, 2008 at 9:31 am.“Apart from that – if you travel anywhere Vodafone has coverage and you don’t have passport on your account, please send me a cheque for £8,000 because you don’t need the money”.
LMAO !!!
Posted by Mark on March 19th, 2008 at 9:41 am.While Vodafone Passport can work out more expensive for short-duration calls, overall it offers our customers substantial savings.
Vodafone Passport is also optional, so any customer that thinks they would save money by not having Vodafone Passport can have it removed from their price plan and revert to our standard rates. Calls are charged per minute, so it can still work out more expensive. For example a 30 second call in Japan without Vodafone Passport will cost £1.49 as that is the per minute rate. With Vodafone Passport it would cost 75p plus the standard home rate.
In response to Loni Avraamides’ comments, following customer feedback you no longer have to be on a preferred network to use Vodafone Passport. In a country where Vodafone Passport is available you can use any available network providing that there is a roaming agreement in place.
For further information about using your phone abroad please visit http://www.vodafone.co.uk/abroad.
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Posted by Vodadrew on March 20th, 2008 at 4:05 pm.Vodafone UK