Treating travelers like customers -- DT addresses the wrongs of roaming

In the not too distant future, artificial geographical barriers will cease to exist in telecom and the opportunity to make arguably un-earned money off of globe-hopping travellers will disappear.

It seems cruel (and not great customer service) for global carriers to charge their very best customers a premium as some form of punishment for travelling, growing the world’s economy and getting financial systems back on track.

Those days are gone – or perhaps more accurately – are going. Telcos around the world still charge artificially high prices for crossing barriers that no longer exist. Regulators have had to step in to force voice roaming charges down and have now turned their attention to data.

Deutsche Telekom has seen the writing on the wall and has taken the lead in addressing the data roaming issue.

Launched in 10 countries, DT has introduced Travel and Surf, a package available to both post and pre paid customers that gives them data options when the leave their home service area. Options range from a daily limit of 10 megabytes for the equivalent of $2.74 to an unlimited amount of data for a weekly fee of $21. Prepaid users pay a little more. Like most data offerings, it can be purchased on-line and usage monitored over the web.

The beginnings of a trend, this breakthrough may herald the end of an unpopular, artificial barrier that was making business users switch off their data services abroad. It is ultimately about customer service and with churn again at the top of the agenda, business logic may at last be driving out data roaming bill shock.

As DT says: Travel and Surf – Happy Holidays.