Vodafone has replaced its roaming charges with a flat daily fee, allowing customers to use the calling minutes, texts and data from their mobile plans for $5-per-day while travelling in 17 countries.
This includes 4G mobile internet services, which Vodafone customers will be able to access while travelling to five countries.
Vodafone consumer director Matt Williams said the service would change the way customers use their mobile phones overseas.
Williams said that someone travelling to Los Angeles, who arrives and looks up a car reservation on their phone, searches for their hotel, organises a dinner out, checks emails and Facebook and calls back to New Zealand could do that all for $5.
The same activities would cost more than $60, Williams claimed, if a customer was with one of Vodafone's competitors.
The $5 charge kicks in as soon as someone uses data, makes a phone call and send a text message. So even someone who wants to send just one text message would be charged $5.
Commenting on this, Williams said Vodafone had asked a lot of customers what they wanted and the $5-plan was exactly what they described.
"We're very confident that for almost everybody this will work very well,"
The $5-per-day plan is available to all Vodafone customers who signed onto a plan in August least year.
Asked if the plan was a loss leader, Williams said this was absolutely "not about losing money."
- By Hamish Fletcher of the New Zealand Herald
