Vodafone launches WorldTraveller; take UK bundles beyond Europe for £5 a day

Vodafone has taken its EuroTraveller service and taken it worldwide. The rather obviously named WorldTraveller service offers the same ability to use your UK minutes, texts, and data for a daily £5 fee.

But before you get too excited, it isn’t everywhere. In fact, at launch the countries included are limited to the USA, India, Australia, New Zealand, Egypt, Ghana, Qatar, and South Africa. But that’s still not a bad list, and it’s sure to grow in the coming months.

The £5 for one day (defined as 0000 to 2359 in the local time of the capital city, as against UK time as with Three’s Euro Internet Pass) allows you to use all of your UK call minutes, texts, and data, plus pay any out of bundle charges at the UK price plan rate.

Meanwhile, EuroTraveller is still available for the reduced cost of £2 per day until the end of August, and was recently updated to include pay as you go users.

WorldTraveller is currently not available on PAYG, and is instead limited to pay monthly customers and some business tariffs.

Customers can opt in by calling 5555 on their Vodafone handset free of charge.

My thoughts? Well, it’s a step in the right direction and hopefully one day we’ll have the EC sorting out EU roaming charges by scrapping them completely, and operators will offer cheaper roaming outside of the EU for a small fixed fee (either daily or monthly).

At £5 per day, it’s still going to cost a fair bit for a week or two-week holiday, and it might remain a more sensible and affordable option to source a local SIM card – especially for a two week break or more.

It will be up to the customer to decide if it’s worth the hassle, although for many destinations you can often get a SIM card before travelling from eBay or Amazon. In my opinion, it’s worth the effort and especially so for anyone that wants a decent amount of data.

But it’s still great to see operators starting a bit of a price war on roaming charges, which might prevent non-EU charges getting even worse as the costs within the EU continue to go down, and eventually disappear completely.

More info: Vodafone Going Abroad