While travelling onboard and using your smartphone, tablet or laptop is not new. However, using the aircraft’s internet service for surfing and accessing emails is fairly new.
Airlines have slowly started offering their passengers with onboard (in-flight) internet service. But the service charge is exorbitantly high—higher than you actually think.
According to Trend Hunter, Singapore Airlines has billed a passenger a whopping $1,172 for merely using the Internet for a few emails.
Jeremy Gutshe, the Trend Hunter CEO, was onboard a Singapore Airlines on 12 November, when he wanted to use the internet. He was given a service, with an access fee of $28.99, to use a maximum of 30MB and would be charges as per actual for every amount of data sent and received thereafter.
Jeremy claimed that he has used the onboard internet to send and receive some emails and did a maximum of sending a 4MP PowerPoint presentation file during the flight.
The airline turned out to bill him a whopping total of $1,172 including $1,142.47 as ‘additional overage charges’.
Jeremy finally ended up counting the amount of pages (155 pageviews) he viewed while he was using the in-flight internet service and the amount of data he actually sent across (4MB). He thought he would pay up a maximum of around $10. His PowerPoint presentation has costed him more the $100 and he hopes that his colleagues, whom he sent it to, liked it.
Jeremy tweeted to the airlines about the issue, and all that Singapore Airlines has replied back was ‘Thank you for the feedback. Our colleagues are looking into this with our service provider, and they'll get back to you soon.’
