My $36,000 Disney Cruise

Welcome back!

Well, maybe not that much, but it came very close to costing me that much money!  You see, Disney provides cellular phone service to guests on-board, however, the information sheet you receive upon boarding states in bold letters at the bottom, “contact your service provider for any roaming charges that you may incur.”

I did not pay a lot of attention to this warning, as I had no intentions of using my cell phone during the cruise.  As I stated on Twitter last week, having wireless internet access seemed a bit too much for a vacation, anyway.  However, as I boarded the ship, I learned that my paternal grandmother had passed away, so I knew I would be getting some calls from my Dad and I might need to be able to communicate with him during my cruise.  So, I gave T-Mobile a call to find out about any additional roaming charges I’d incur for these calls.  As expected, they were quite high at $4.99 per minute (only slightly less than the cruise sea-to-land calls at $7.99 per minute).  What I did not think about was the fact that my BlackBerry is continually transferring data.

The T-Mobile customer (no) service rep was kind enough to inform me that I would incur this $4.99 per minute charge just for having my cell phone on over the weekend, due to the data transfers!  I was just going to leave my phone on for the whole cruise, even if I did not use it to make a call, as was my wife.  It’s a good thing we made this call to T-Mobile, or we would have received a bill for $36,000, just by leaving the phones on over the 3-night cruise!  That would be one expensive cruise!

Tweet This Post