A passenger on a Singapore Airlines flight was recently shocked to receive a bill of USD 1,171.46 for using the plane’s in-flight Wi-Fi.
Jeremy Gutsche used the Wi-Fi connection on a flight between London and Singapore and apparently – in between sleeping – whiled away some of the flight answering emails and uploading a single power point document.
In total, he said this amounted to just 155 page views. He knows this because he counted them in his head in an effort to gauge the cost of his usage.
“I wish I could blame an addiction to Netflix or some intellectual documentary that made me $1,200 smarter,” he wrote on his blog.
“However, the Singapore Airlines internet was painfully slow, so videos would be impossible and that means I didn’t get any smarter … except about how to be charged a lot of money for stuff.”
Mr Gutsche admits that at one point he downloaded a 4MB document that he needed to show to colleagues, which took an hour.
“That doc probably cost me $100 to upload, so I hope my team liked it,” he said.
“I actually even emailed them a warning that my upload was taking a while. That email probably cost me $10. And yes, the pricing per MB was disclosed on sign-up, but I bought the $30 package, slept through most of the flight, and really didn’t think I’d end up a thousand bucks past the limit.”
He said the flight had been “otherwise enjoyable”.
Singapore Airlines offers a variety of inflight connectivity options, including Internet access, text and multimedia messaging.
He did though get a nice message from his hotel in Singapore, the Shangri La, who welcomed him to my hotel with a note explaining that the internet HERE, is always free. Meanwhile, he’s had no replies from Singapore Airlines (SQ).
Image Credit: trendhunter.com
