Travelers are engaged in a never-ending war over long distance calls.
Travelers continually have to develop strategies. The latest gouging tactic seems to be misrepresentation: Telling you that your call will be handled in one way, then handling it in another.
The owner of any phone used by the public, from a simple coin phone in a restaurant to a complex system covering a 1,000-room hotel, can sign with any long distance service. Many sign up with AT&T, MCI or Sprint, but some sign up with small companies that charge much higher rates and rebate a chunk of their take to the phone’s owner. A traveler who bills a call from one of those phones to a hotel room or a credit card pays the high charge. Those charges can be stiff in the U.S.; in foreign hotels, they’re often outlandish.
The U.S. government has ruled that owners of public phones must notify users which long distance company is hooked into each of their telephones. Moreover, the system is set up so that you can always access your own major long distance carrier. All three big U.S. long distance companies have developed “home direct” services that bypass hotels’ systems and connect you with the U.S. carrier’s system. Logically, you’d think those precautions would protect travelers from surprise big bills, but that isn’t always the way things work out.
Recently I used a public pay phone for a long distance call. The placard on the phone stated that AT&T would handle long distance service. But when I punched in my phone card numbers, I heard unfamiliar clicking noises, rather than the usual weird hum I get when I go through AT&T. Then an operator came on. When I asked the operator to identify herself and her company, she said she was with a telephone company I’d never heard of. I’ve had similar experiences in other locations.
Are pay phones often mislabeled? I asked that question of an organization that specializes in keeping track of phone rates and monitoring phone abuses. The director said that mislabeling was fairly common. Often, a phone owner initially signs up with one of the major long distance companies, then switches carriers without changing the placard on his telephones.
The phone expert said that many phone owners were not signing up with one of the big companies just long enough to justify the placard, then switching to a company that gouges travelers. But some may be doing that. Only when you receive the bill weeks later will you find that the unknown company is a high-price outfit, he said.
This summer I was in a London hotel where the “guest information” booklet gave instructions about how to reach USA Direct, AT&T’s home-direct service. But when I dialed those numbers, I was connected to a U.S. operator from another long distance company. To test the system, I placed a call of 3 minutes to my office, then went to a coin phone in the lobby and placed another 3-minute call through AT&T. The AT&T call cost $5.99, the hotel’s phone company charged $15.56.
Never assume you’ll get the long-distance carrier listed on a pay phone or a phone in your hotel room. If you don’t recognize the tones or sign-on message of the specified carrier, hang up immediately. In hotels, ask operators how to connect to your preferred carrier. At a public phone, dial the direct access number specified by your carrier.
