Singapore: Want to use an international flight to Singapore to catch up on your email? Better think twice. A man has been charged an whopping $1,200 (£750) for using the Wi-Fi on a flight from London to Singapore.
Jeremy Gutsche, a Canadian entrepreneur, claimed he mostly used the internet for work emails between naps and watched no videos. He was hit with the Singapore Airlines bill after getting off the plane on Wednesday, discovering he had racked up $1,142 (£730) in charges for going over his purchased 30MB package. Gutsche is the CEO of Trend Hunter website, where he wrote about the shock bill.
Claiming he viewed only 155 pages, he added: “I wish I could blame an addiction to Netflix or some intellectual documentary that made me $1,200 smarter. However, the Singapore Airlines internet was painfully slow, so videos would be impossible and that means I didn’t get any smarter.â€
Sending a 4MB PowerPoint presentation cost him around $100 (£64), Gutsche estimated, and another $10 (£6.40) went on an email to colleagues warning them the upload was slow.
“At one point, I spent about an hour uploading one 4mb powerpoint doc. That doc probably cost me $100 to upload, so I hope my team liked it. 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 the flight, and really didn’t think I’d end up a thousand bucks past the limit,†he said.
Conditions listed on the Singapore Airlines website state that varying Wi-Fi packages are offered on Airbus A380 and Boeing 777-300ER planes which must be selected before passengers connect. They are based on the amount of data used or the length of time online but anything going over the package limit is charged substantially more.
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