So first and foremost, unless your company is paying for it, there’s no reason why you should ever use roaming. Until we have an EU type agreement which abolishes the ridiculous fees we now pay on roaming, you’re much better off finding a wifi hotspot or getting a local sim card and surfing to your heart’s content.
If you must roam, for whatever reason, you might as well get something out of it. Krisflyer has a partnership with a company called TravellingConnect. How this works is that you earn miles for incoming/outgoing calls, data and SMS utilised while roaming. What’s the earn rate like? Here’s some popular destinations
| Country | Outgoing | Incoming | Data | SMS |
| Hong Kong- 3 | 2 miles/min | 2 miles/min | 0 | 0 |
| Japan- NTT DoCoMo | 1 mile/min | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| UAE-du | 1 mile/min | 0 | 2/MB | 0 |
| Indonesia-Indosat | 4 miles/min | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Macau-3 | 1 mile/min | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| South Korea-KT | 1 mile/min | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| TUrkey-Turkcell | 4 miles/min | 0 | 0 | 1 mile/2 SMS |
I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise.
To summarise, I’m not even going to bother calculating what rebate this is, because the answer is “minuscule”. Yes, it’s better than a slap in the face, but only just.
Long story short- don’t roam. If you must roam, register with TravelConnect and get some miles out of it.
