In late April 2022 I made an unintended overnight visit to Chicago, the stay was comfortable at the Hyatt Regency courtesy of KLM. Unintended because 24 hours earlier I had departed Nairobi late Friday night, on KLM for a flight to Charlotte via Amsterdam and Atlanta. However due to chaos at the Amsterdam airport caused by ‘holiday travel’, shortage of workers and an ongoing strike, and I suspect overbooking by KLM, I missed my connecting flight and was delayed in Amsterdam for 7 hours.
KLM rebooked me on an American Airlines (AA) flight from Amsterdam to Chicago, arriving 26 hours after my departure from Nairobi. KLM had the audacity to then book me on AA flights to Charlotte, North Carolina via Denver, Colorado to arrive at my original destination at 0603 ET Sunday morning. I declined the opportunity to spend 6 more hours flying across the United States of America in my fatigued state. The AA representative, on behalf of KLM, acceded to my strong request to spend the night in a hotel Chicago that Saturday night and rebooked me on a 2 hour direct flight from Chicago to Charlotte on Sunday morning.
With my Hyatt Regency accommodation and meal vouchers in hand, the next step was to make my way to the hotel and get some much needed sleep. In a city I had never been to previously, I figured the best way to get to the hotel was to call and to ask if they have shuttle buses between the airport and hotel or if I should take a taxi. I turned on the data on my roaming Safaricom postpaid mobile phone and searched for the telephone number of the hotel on Google. Perhaps because of my fatigue or that it was 4.59 AM in Kenya, it did not occur to me to consider what the data costs would be when roaming or even to check what network I was roaming on. At 5.03 AM (Kenya time) I called the Hyatt Rosemont hotel and they confirmed the Hyatt Regency had shuttle buses running between the hotel and airport. I then made my way to the pick up spot at the airport and 12 minutes later I was at the massive hotel.
Only a month later, when I received the Safaricom mobile phone bill, did I realize it cost approximately KES 40,000 (USD $350) to use 21,534.68 kb (21.5 mb) of internet data when roaming - the charges before taxes were KES 29,920.64 and the taxes (20% excise and 16% VAT) were about KES 10,000. It is needless to say how frustrated I was. Please note that I realize that some of this data may have been used by other applications on the phone and not the browser but I am sure I did not do any updates as I was only online for about 3 minutes.
One year later before setting off on another work trip to the USA I did some research on roaming costs as I was determined not to incur another large bill. To their credit Safaricom have very good information on roaming their website. I then double checked by sending them a tweet and they confirmed that data charges when roaming with Safaricom in the The United States of America on AT&T is KES 5 / mb. A very fair rate even in comparison to the rate of 0.20 KES / mb on the no expiry bundles I use in Kenya. It was however shocking to see that if I accidentally selected T-Mobile, the cost spikes to KES 1,980 / mb. (I have included the rates for data roaming in the Netherlands for comparison.)
Safaricom also sends an SMS with the roaming rates upon arrival in a different country and connecting to a new mobile network. The key is to be alert to what network you are connected to, double check the rates and if not favorable either switch manually to a network with better roaming rates or do not use the roaming service if the rates are prohibitive.
I loaded KES 2,000 on my personal prepaid Safaricom mobile phone and that was sufficient for all the internet data I required when using Uber and any other application I needed to use for a one week visit when connected to AT&T.
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