Everyday Mobile (formerly Woolworths Mobile) has been my go-to mobile provider for years, but a poor experience with its roaming add-ons has left me seriously thinking about switching it up.
These days, travel eSIM providers like Airalo, Simify and Salie are a great alternative to dealing with the lower data allowances and higher asking prices of roaming add-ons. Even if you’re with Vodafone, the savings on offer can be hard to pass up. However, ahead of my recent trip to Barcelona to cover this year’s Mobile World Congress, that’s exactly what I did.
Instead, I opted to stick with my current mobile provider and see what Everyday Mobile’s roster of roaming add-ons had to offer. At the time of writing, I had two options. The first only had 2GB of data while the second threw in another 3GB as well as some talk and text. In any case, neither of these add-ons are particularly great value – especially when compared to what you can get from a travel eSIM nowadays.
What’s more, the amount of hassle involved made me wish I had gone about getting overseas connectivity any other way. If there’s any front where buying roaming add-ons should have the edge on travel eSIMs, it’s convenience, but my recent experience with Everyday Mobile was anything but.
Ahead of my flight, I logged into the Everyday Mobile app and purchased the $20 add-on seen above. Despite the in-app warnings that my seven-day expiry period would begin the second I purchased the add-on, I did not receive either an SMS notification upon doing so. I didn’t get an email confirmation either, or even a charge on my banking app.
It turns out that this is because that add-on was automatically rolled into my monthly bill, but at the moment, I had no real way of immediately verifying whether my purchase had gone through. Hours passed, and as my flight’s boarding time began to draw near, I still waited in vain for any sort of acknowledgement about my add-on purchase.
I knew I’d have a few WiFi hotspots between Sydney and my final destination, but I’d had trouble activating Everyday Mobile’s roaming offer overseas before, so I wanted to make sure I had all my ducks in a row before take-off.
No such word arrived, so in a bid to attain some sort of pre-flight peace of mind, I decided to call up customer support. Surely, someone on the other end of the line could bring up a file and confirm whether my order had gone through.
To my surprise, I was told that my account didn’t have any roaming add-ons active. Over the phone, they asked me to repeat my purchase using the app – which I did. Again, no SMS confirmation, receipt or bank charges came through. However, this time, the representative on the line told me that my account now had a roaming add-on enabled.
Boarding my flight, I just had to trust that was indeed the case and that I hadn’t just been tricked into buying the same roaming add-on twice. The first time I flew over to Las Vegas to cover CES, I made the mistake of accidentally enabling roaming and incurring several hundred dollars of charges.
It’s an experience I’ve been lucky to avoid repeating in the years since, but it shouldn’t be this hard or this much of a hassle to know that I’ve taken the steps to make sure that’s the case. It’s one thing for travel eSIM providers to beat traditional mobile providers when it comes to the cost of international roaming, but if providers like Everyday Mobile can fumble the fundamentals this badly, then I can’t imagine that difference in price might be the tip of the iceberg for many consumers.
I’m past the point in my life where I’m willing to optimise my travel expenses such that I’d change over to Vodafone for the convenience of a single trip, but if the choice is dealing with the ambiguity and hassle of making sure that my roaming add-ons have been enabled correctly or adding an eSIM to my device, I know which way I’ll be going next time I manage to escape Sydney.
Fergus Halliday
Digital Content Editor
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