Don’t let overbilling take the joy out of your next RV adventure.
Planning an RV holiday can be lots of fun. In addition to making reservations and calculating travel times, a focus on maintaining your vacation budget is important. With all your attention directed toward this, one must remember to be sure the regular home services are also looked at. Suspending newspaper deliveries and like services are easily overlooked, and if so, can be a waste of money as well as a possible security risk.
Check the Charges for Overbilling
Many make changes to their mobile phone service. Different roaming packages can result in savings to the monthly bill while traveling outside of the home area. A caution here is needed. Be sure to cancel or change the services back once you have returned home. Failure to do this can be quite costly.
After your trip, check your cellular phone bill for the costs incurred during your travels. This can help avoid incorrect charges. These billing errors are all too common with cellular accounting departments. Over charging and failure to implement a suspension are among the more common errors.
Overbilling: Roaming Goes Awry
Case in point. This past winter I traveled for over three months vacationing from coast to coast. Prior to departing, I added unlimited voice and text with nationwide coverage on both my phone and my wife’s phone. Upon returning, I visited the network carrier’s store, where I had arranged these changes. I requested that both our units be taken off the roaming packages and put back on our regular home plans. Great!
A month passes. The cellular bill for the last month and the return home arrives. Viewing it, I saw that only my phone had the roaming package removed. Studying it closer, I now realized that the monthly bills for the entire trip were higher than they should be. This was found to be caused by additional talk minutes being charged. That’s strange; we had unlimited.
Righting the Overbilling Wrongs
I returned to the phone store. Yes, they agreed that my wife’s phone had somehow not been taken off the roaming plan. They also claimed they did not know why I was charged for additional airtime when, in fact, we had unlimited airtime. They arranged a credit.
So, the planning of the vacation, and the associated costs, do not seem to stop upon returning home. Indeed, there may be more to be done to avoid such rip-offs. It is strange that these mistakes rarely, if at all, happen to our favor.
Peter Mercer—Looking After Your Wallet
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