Why is TravelPass activating without cause?

[Linda_1]

I am traveling in Australia. Travel Pass is activated on my phone and my husband's phones. However, cellular data is turned off and all data is restricted to WiFi. The data on the phones has not been turned on, even for one second.

We have not made any calls and have not sent any texts. The Travel Pass is supposed to be activated when you call, text, or use data. We have done none of the above but both of us got texts saying that our first 24-hour travel pass was about to expire. Since we had not done anything to activate the travel pass, I immediately tried getting online to deactivate travel pass since it was obviously charging us even though we had done nothing on the phone at all. All the Verizon international servers are down, they say, and I don't know if this is a permanent inability to connect from Australia or if it is truly only a temporary situation. So we just turned the phones to airplane mode to keep from being charged without cause.

Last year we used Travel Pass in Mexico and it worked as advertised. We were only billed on the days that we actually used data, text or calls. This time we have not used any and we do not want to be charged. It is an inconvenience to be on airplane mode because our phones do not update for the time zone and because all texts from Verizon cannot come through.

Does anyone have a better solution? Any experience trying to deactivate Travel Pass while out of the country? Any experience being charged for Travel Pass when you didn't use it?

[sprmankalel]

It seems that your device being powered on and connecting to the local network (whether you used it or not) would activate this feature. Turn the phone into airplane mode and this will disconnect from any network.

I imagine that the foreign network is reporting to VZW that you are connected. They have to be compensated for that ability.

[Weth · Accepted solution]

Check My Verizon.  Does it report any international text, voice, or data being used?  If not, you can use that to argue you should not have been charged that day.  There was major network disruption is SoCal on Friday here, that may be the servers down message you received. 

[Linda_1]

Thank you for your response. A Verizon representative contacted me to say that the servers were down in CA yesterday but are fine now. Therefore I could check my usage and see if Verizon had logged any usage at all. When I did this, I found that there was zero usage. The Verizon representative said that I could ask Verizon to remove the charges based on the zero usage. For now, I have turned off Travel Pass so that I do not have to have my phone on airplane mode. Now I can receive texts for 5 cents and send texts for 50 cents without triggering the $10 per day. For the future, I will need to turn on Travel Pass just before the day that I intend to use the daily $10 to be included in my regular allowances of data, texts, and calls. In the meantime, my phone will give me the correct time of day in each zone without triggering the daily charge.

[Weth]

Make sure you have data turned completely off or you can get a huge surprise bill. Many have been burned by this on pay go plans.

[Linda_1]

Thank you for your response. I was able to logon to the server and verify that I had zero usage. I also turned off Travel Pass so that this cannot happen again and so that I can receive and send texts (if I want to) without triggering the $10 daily charge. I understand that I will need to turn on Travel Pass if I want to use my regular allowances of data, texts, and voice. I appreciate your response.