What's the story with roaming charges? Being charged scandalous sums by hotels to use in-room telephones for calls home used to be one of the more unpleasant features of going abroad. With the arrival of the mobile phone, the hotels lost out on a big earner but lest consumers had a chance to savour low-cost calls home, mobile operators stepped in and started ripping them off with spurious roaming charges.
While the European Commission (EC) has recently stepped up its assault against these charges, mobile users still face phone bills for their two-week holiday that can cost more than the airfare and there is no guarantee the situation will have eased even by next summer.
Irish consumers making a four-minute call home from France using their mobile can expect to pay as much as €5 while, for holiday makers travelling to Malta, the same call can cost an astonishing €9.76. Receiving a four-minute call while in France costs up to €3.97, and while in Malta it costs €7.96.
While mobile operators across the EU bleat on about the higher costs associated with providing its customers with roaming facilities, they are less vocal when discussing the fact that the prices consumers pay are up to five times more than the actual cost the operators charge each other. Roaming generates €8.5 billion a year in turnover for mobile operators, of which up to €5.7 billion is profit.
Last month, the EC finally got around to publishing proposed new regulations aimed at taking a big chunk out of these profits. Information society commissioner Viviane Reding has proposed regulations to introduce a price cap on the fees that operators charge each other to carry roaming calls. The impact of the regulations could see the mobile operators losing up to €4 billion in profits.
If agreement is reached between the commission and member-states on the new regulations, it will become cheaper for firms to carry calls from rival companies and cheaper for consumers too. This is assuming, of course, these reductions are passed on, which is by no means certain.
Statistics show that firms routinely charge their roaming customers up to four times as much as the equivalent price charged to domestic users for making a call. So if a French customer in Italy is charged between 50 cent and €1.18 a minute, an Italian customer in Italy making a call of the same duration is billed just 10 cent. The disparity cannot be explained by increased costs to operators, the commission has found.
Under the new regulations, Reding has proposed two price caps. If accepted, the first will apply to calls received while travelling abroad and will prevent operators marking up retail prices more than 30 per cent above the wholesale cost of a call. The second cap is to apply to calls made while travelling abroad. The same 30 per cent cap will be set on retail prices, but it will not kick in until six months after the regulation is passed into law by the European Parliament and member states.
"Here is a practical application of our Europe of results approach," EC president José Manuel Barroso said when the proposal was announced in July. "With our proposal today, consumers using mobile phones within the single market will get a fairer deal." The mobile phone industry was, understandably, considerably less enthusiastic about the plan and insisted - despite all the evidence to the contrary - that regulation was unnecessary as it was bringing down roaming rates of its own volition.
And this is at least partially true. Mobile operators in the Republic have been forced in recent months to drop roaming charges for customers from the Republic who travel to the North - as long as they stay on that company's network.
Vodafone has gone a step farther and introduced a "Passport" system for 18 other countries. Once you register for the service - which you can do online, in shops or over the phone - you pay only a 79c call connection fee plus the same rate as you pay at home when visiting one of the 18 other Vodafone Passport countries.
Despite the positive noises coming from the EC and the tentative steps being made by the industry, lower prices may still be some way off. The European Parliament and member states have to have their say on the regulations and the mobile firms lobbying machine has yet to get going. A number of commissioners - including internal market commissioner Charlie McCreevy - have expressed reservations about the proposals and it may be up to 18 months before the regulation takes effect.
In the meantime, careful consumers can do something to cut their holiday phone bills. While abroad your phone is almost certainly automatically configured to select the network you use but it may not necessarily be the cheapest option. An Irish Vodafone customer travelling in Spain, for example, may be automatically assigned to the Movistar network where a four-minute call costs €4.76. Using the Spanish Vodafone network however, the same call costs at least €1 less.
Handsets allow for manual selection and when travelling you should always select this option. Your phone manual will guide you through the process - or, if you've long since binned that, call your operator's customer care centre and have it take you through the process. And while you're on, ask about designated partner networks and what is the cheapest option in your destination country.
In addition consumers should always use off-peak rates and text instead of talking. If you travel frequently to the same country it may be worthwhile buying a local SIM card. Your number will change while you are away but you will pay local rates for outgoing calls and while calls home will be charged at international rates it should be cheaper than roaming.
Alternatively you could just keep your phone turned off. Better still, leave it at home. You're on holiday, after all, and you probably don't need to get updates on the weather at home and what's happening on Coronation Street.
For more information on roaming charges in the EU, see http://europa.eu.int/information_society/roaming
