After three years, the Travel & Surf roaming option has helped increase mobile data roaming traffic in the Deutsche Telekom network by more than 500 percent. Starting in the DT footprint in Europe, the offer now has a global reach.
Deutsche Telekom has proven that its mobile data roaming offer is an international success. By late 2014, the company sold 18.3 million passes to customers across its entire footprint in Europe, and the number keeps growing. The proposition offers the company’s 130 million-plus customers extremely competitive prices in the industry for mobile data roaming as well as a groundbreaking level of billing transparency. “With Travel & Surf, we were the first telco in Europe to really listen and to give our customers what they want: worry-free data usage while traveling,” explains Claudia Nemat, Board member at Deutsche Telekom for Europe & Technology. “We have also seen many of our competitors following suit. Since we launched in 2011, several are launching similar propositions, which we see as a compliment to our spirit of innovation.”
One of the key selling point for the Travel & Surf proposition is the transparency and bill control it offers users. “Travel & Surf has effectively eliminated bill shock for our customers when roaming,” explains Joachim Koutny, Head of Pricing for Europe at DT. “Before, everyone turned off their smartphones as soon as they arrived in a foreign country. Today, our customers turn them on and book their passes.” Depending on which DT subsidiary customers are signed up with, the service sends them a text message once 80 percent of the volume that has been booked is used up. In addition, they can check any time how many MBs of the pass volume have been used up so far via an app or the cost-free landing page.
Next step: Going global
Customer surveys have shown that over 80 percent of customers are satisfied with the offer. The number of passes sold has also increased 441 percent in the company’s most important roaming markets since its launch. This success within the DT footprint in Europe led several national companies to extend their Travel & Surf propositions to include the rest of the world as well. “This proposition is possible thanks in large part to the scale Deutsche Telekom can leverage. With all of the national companies in our footprint working together, we can use that scale to give all of our customers the best roaming offer on the European market,” says Nemat.