Paralytic

Which airline lets you get a boarding pass without typing in a password?

HIDDY

Which lounge was this? Was it third party operated?

CMK10

Every US airline for sure. You can just give them your confirmation number and your last name and it will pull it up.

Paralytic

Granted, though I'd suggest the combination of surname and booking ref is analgous to a password.

paulwuk

Ba

Paralytic

Jagboi

He's still employed. One of our core values is "We learn from our mistakes". You can be sure he'll never do it again.

paulwuk

Highest roaming charge I've seen is Ł6/MB, or Ł1.80 a minute.

US$55k is Ł34k. For 7 days, 24 hours a day, that works out to be 168 hours, or Ł200 an hour, 33MB/hour, or 73kbit a second. So that's doable in a city. Just about.

Was he watching TV 24 hours a day or something?

Jagboi

We're Canadian based, and Canada has some of the highest roaming charges in the world at $25-30/MB. When all your email gets pushed to your phone the data usage can add up quickly. I forget the rate for voice calls back to Canada, but it was obscene.

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2011/06..._n_873723.html

There have been numerous stories in the media of people who go to Mexico for a week's holiday and come home to a bill for $10-15K for wireless charges.

Here is one, $22,000 for 700MB of youtube: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/britis...fido-1.1333067

AA_EXP09

Why these people don't take out their SIMs when going to another nation is another question...
(I always do unless there is a roaming agreement...)

Jagboi

Most people probably are not tech savvy enough to know about SIM's. It might also be a Canadian thing because phones are always sold with a contract and are locked to a particular carrier. You cannot buy a SIM card separately from a phone here. I'm sure after saying that someone will prove me wrong, but it's certainly unusual.

LondonElite

Something!

AA_EXP09

I am aware of contract locking (I myself am a Canadian citizen and this practice is also common in Singapore and the USA where a rebate/discount is given in exchange for a contract.)
As for buying a SIM separately from a mobile, yes you can in Canada.
I would not call my coworkers tech savvy, though I know at least some who also hold Malay SIMs that they use when they cross the causeway (they are Malays with Singapore PR.)

paulwuk

I'd like to think of myself as tech saavy. I travel to a fair few countries (see sig), and I'm certainly not going to go to the trouble of maintaining 20 sims for each country on some terrible PAYG deal, with the right data bits enabled, then make sure my phone is forwarded to the right one so I receive incoming calls, then have all the hassle on landing of getting the phone working when I find the sim has expired, for 5 days a year.

My phone bill is high, but compared with my hotel bills or my flight bills it's peanuts.

That said, I have a Ł100 a month = 200MB international data usage plan, which has plenty of room for taxi-email and perhaps the occasional flyertalk check

I've seen high bills in the tens-of-thousands, but that's on satellite phones (or more likely satellite IP). I wonder if american (and thus canadian) can get away with it as "going abroad" isn't in the national psyche like in europe?

LondonElite

Idiot parents if this is true. How irresponsible and selfish to assume the lounge staff would (passively) look after their children. This is the landside equivalent of parents who leave their young teens (13-17 typically) in Y while sitting in F themselves.