topic Change your policy on roaming charges in Roaming

Change your policy on roaming charges

Bosun1955 — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 01:22:06 GMT

We travel every year to Australia and Barbados to see family and the EE roaming charges are so ridiculous as to just ignore. We buy an e-sim for every trip at a fraction of the cost of EE. Holafly or Amaysim are just so much better value. The only hassle for us is letting the family know the temporary phone number we have whilst away. EE roaming charges were reasonable 3 years ago but now its putting us off renewing our EE contract.

Re: Change your policy on roaming charges

Northerner — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 06:16:10 GMT

Hi @Bosun1955

You're paying thousands to travel to Australia and Barbados but the roaming charges are the issue.

You haven't said if you're PAYG or pay monthly contract becase EE have some good inclusive roaming packages on their pay monthly tariffs.

Thanks

Re: Change your policy on roaming charges

Chris_B — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 07:26:19 GMT

@Bosun1955 Amaysim is a MVNO network to Australia so obviously using a local network will be cheaper than using any UK network via roaming. So there’s no comparison there for a start, It’ll be the same if you was a Amaysim customer roaming within the UK, it’ll be cheaper to use a local UK network then pay roaming costs. Exactly the same with Holafly but they more of a global MVNO network. And I’m more surprised you’re not a Holafly customer within the UK as you seem to use them when abroad.

Re: Change your policy on roaming charges

bristolian — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 09:44:44 GMT

@Northerner wrote:
You're paying thousands to travel to Australia and Barbados but the roaming charges are the issue.

In addition to this point, the benefit of a local SIM - whether "e" or "p" - will always be local in-country usage. An issue, which you've glossed over, will be international usage to & from your home country. Your local SIM will have a local in-country number for which your UK contacts will have to pay international rates to contact.

EE's roaming packages now allow flat-rate inclusive usage, which in Australia would be £25/week. Assuming your bundle allows unlimited calls within the UK, this package would allow no-additional-cost calls to & from the UK and within Australia. Compared with the cost of travel to Australia, this strikes me as excellent value, but naturally every user is free to make their own value judgement and purchase accordingly.

In Barbados, the option is for £7.50/day so maybe not quite the same economics but the principles remain.