British vacationers traveling abroad are encouraged to change one of their mobile phone settings before boarding a flight.
There are many things to think about before jumping down. Please double check your passport to make sure you have a boarding pass. However, it is important not to ignore your phone settings. Travel experts say turning off autoplay on your phone could be the difference between a smooth, budget-friendly holiday and an expensive roaming bill. If your phone has autoplay turned on while data roaming is enabled, you can quietly eat up the background data from the moment you land at your destination and begin scrolling.
Georgia Brivida, travel expert at ESIM provider Sim Local, explains:
“It's fine when you're connected to Wi-Fi at home, but when you pay per megabyte overseas, using your mobile phone as you normally would, you can quickly burn data quietly.
With this feature enabled, scrolling through social media sites like Tiktok and Instagram with just 10 minutes of streaming video on YouTube and Netflix with up to 100MB will allow you to use up to 100MB and use up to 100MB, according to SIM Local, which means you can use up to 100MB and use it much faster than knowing your mobile data.
Web browsing uses just 10 minutes and slightly less with around 10MB, and with Spotify or podcast streaming you can use up to 15MB of data.
So, if you spend 30 minutes scrolling through Tiktok while waiting for a taxi on landing, it's gone around 60MB of data and you're watching some YouTube videos on your way to the hotel.
It's very easy to get some gigabytes of data in a few days of your vacation. Without a proper roaming plan, you can scroll through the phone rates for around £120 or more.
But fortunately, it's very easy to turn off autoplay and it's worth doing to save on expensive bills. Additionally, you will have more control over when data is used.
To turn it off on iOS (iPhone), go to Settings, then use Accessibility to tap Motion. Find and turn off the toggle switch for Auto Play Video Preview
On your Android phone, go to Settings, scroll down and select Google, select all services, tap Search, Assistant, Voice, and select “More Settings.” From here, click preview autoplay video and select “Never.”
