Odd behaviour of spend cap

[Powellj3]

Hi,

I’ve just come back from a few weeks touring Europe.  For each of the days I used my phone in the GoRoam area I expected a charge of £2.  Indeed, in the end I was charged £20 which was what I expected.  But I had a spend cap in place and it caused bedlam - even when I was well under the spend cap.  It stopped me using the phone on several days and caused aggravation I didn’t want on holiday.

basically, in the end I needed to raise the cap to £40 to spend over £14!  I called three and the CSA said that it was because my recent bill had been issued but my DDR was yet to be collected.  Surely that is stupid.  Park that for a moment.  Even if it was the case (and it certainly doesn’t mention it in the online guidance on spend caps), my last bill plus my GoRoam charges to date where still below £30 (I’d raised the limit to £30 as an experiment to fix the problem).  The response from the CSA is that if I spent anything after that I would be over £30 (with the DDR yet to be collected).  So the system would not let me spend the GoRoam (£14 + £10.45[uncollected DDR] + £2 [that day’s GoRoam) would all add up to less than the[then] £30 cap.  Sorry if this sounds complicated, but the detail is needed to show the idiocy of the situation.  I did raise the cap to £40 and it did start working again.  

so I needed a spend cap of £40 to spend £20 (10 days GoRoam).   Finally I received no text messages saying that I was at 80% or 100% of spend cap AND as I came ashore (cruise ship - the phone was in airline mode on the ship) and the phone connected to the local network, I received a text saying I had an hour left of my GoRoam - which was wrong.  That had been sent when the phone was out of network range and delivered only when back ashore.  There was no actual message saying that the phone wasn’t working because three couldn’t collect the £2 because of the spend cap debacle.

does any body understand how this cap works and can suggest some justification for it?

thanks

[SarahC]

Hey @Powellj3 

I hope you had a lovely holiday, I've been looking at cruises myself for next year's holiday! ⛵ However, it's sad to read that you had to deal with quite a bit of bother when arranging your roaming data.

It's hard for us to say exactly what's happened without looking at your account. A spend cap shouldn't be impacted by the current bill waiting to be collected by Direct Debit, so there might've been confusion on the part of the advisor there. We appreciate your feedback about our online guidance on spend caps though, and will certainly keep that in mind for a refresh.

As for the delayed text messages to your phone, unfortunately our 'approaching spend limit' text would not send due to the airplane mode and no network, so it's possible the text you did get when ashore was sent by us prior when there was signal, but the delivery to your phone was delayed.

If you would like to look into this further, especially if you are planning on being away again, then please do let us know and we will drop you a private message.

SarahC

[Powellj3]

Hi,

   I didn’t think that the uncollected DDR would impact the spend cap.  I just found it really frustrating when two different CSAs came up with odd explanations that amounted to some spurious reason that the cap had been enforced followed by you haven’t spent over the cap so just raise it and it will work.  Not what you want to hear and, frankly I had no faith in it.

regarding the text - the issue is the wording of the text.  It should not say “your GoRoam will expire in an hour” it should say “your GoRoam expires at hh:mm on ddd” because you have no control over when it is delivered and don’t even give any indication of when it was sent.

I believe you have a real problem with how your spend cap is implemented.  Personally, I’ll hold my breath until my next bill is generated and see if it is actually just my regular costs and the ~£20 given as extra costs.