AFTER arriving for a two week holiday in Mauritius Joanna Rubins and her husband was napping after the long 10-hour flight. While they were sleeping their 10-year-old daughter Siena used their mobile phone to keep her amused, playing on the viral video app TikTok. More about roaming bill shocks find out below.

She created a short 15 second long video but wasn’t aware that the game was quickly racking up data charges on her parent’s phone. Quickly text messages began popping up from their phone operator Vodafone, but Siena dismissed them as she was engrossed in her game.

As soon as Joanna, 42, who lives in Millhill woke up and saw text messages on the phone she knew something was wrong. In just under an hour Siena has managed to spend £5,000 in international data charges. “I nearly had a heart attack. I felt sick,” Joanna told The Sun. “I thought it was a mistake.

No cap on charges roaming bill shocks

In Europe, phone firms are banned from charging customers more than it would cost to use their phone in the UK for calls, texts and data thanks to EU rules. But outside of the EU, there is no cap on charges that phone firms can levy.

Vodafone offers free roaming at no extra cost in 48 destinations – but not Mauritius.

The phone network charges 60p per MB of data used while in Mauritius and since Siena had used 1GB of data the couple was baffled at the shockingly large bill.

The usual €50 cap on international roaming charges applied by Vodafone has been suspended on the phone, which was mostly used for her husband’s work.

It meant that there was no limit on what Vodafone could charge and Siena didn’t understand what the warning texts were saying.

It comes as holidaymakers are warned about huge phone bills abroad by comparison website uSwitch. Destinations such as Morocco, Canada and UAE can be especially expensive for travellers.

As soon as they were back from holiday they contacted Vodafone about the bill but they were only offered a paltry £100 off the £5,000 total.

It wasn’t until the family contacted The Sun that Vodafone changed its mind and refunded the full £5,000.

Customers are told about costs via text when they arrive. It will also inform customers via text if they’ve exceeded their data limit and if they are using additional data and how much this costs.

A spokesperson from Vodafone said: “Mauritius number of holiday destinations that sit outside these 152 Roam Free or Roam Further destinations.

“The customer in question manually removed the data cap that we put in place and therefore opted out of receiving warning texts. roaming bill shocks

“The data costs incurred were in line with other operators in the market.

“We advise all customers to check their mobile data settings when they’re abroad and set their spend limit at a sensible amount that is proportionate to the amount of data that they use. Source: SUn