It is important to avoid unnecessary costs when traveling. I recently visited my son who is studying in Melbourne.
“Hej och välkommen till Australien!
Här gäller följande priser:
Ringa: 19 kr/min,
Svara: 19 kr/min,
Surf: Surfpass 99 kr/dag (svensk tid) max 1 GB,
Sms: 4 kr/st och ta emot 0 kr/st,
Mms: 10 kr/st och ta emot 10 kr/st…”
Ouch, I thought, that’s not cheap. In two weeks, it will be about 1.400: – to surf for a maximum of 1 GB per day. And the price of a phone call can easily be several hundred Swedish crowns.
We would be moving around and of course want the same conditions as at home, with maps and other apps on our phones, so the above prices were not very attractive.
So here’s a travel tip and something to think about for your own business.
How to avoid unnecessary costs
Hmm, I thought, my phone has the possibility to use e-SIM, so I can have two phone numbers running at the same time, i.e. both my Swedish and another one. The idea took me to an Australian telephone company. Indeed, it was no problem at all to get an Australian subscription for one month.
It included 60GB of browsing and 800 minutes of international calls, that’s more than 13 hours, which goes a long way. Within Australia, there were free calls.
It must have been expensive, you might think? No, not at all. It cost 20 Australian dollars, which is about SEK 140 or USD 14 . If I compare just for browsing, I get more than four times as much data for a tenth of the price.
The cost was only one tenth of what it would have been if we had used the “offer” from our Swedish operator.
So what are the operational lessons? Yes, it is easy to sit as a company and charge excessive prices without understanding that this drives development in a different direction than what you think. We see it again and again.
Innovations and regulations can kill your cash cow
If phone companies overcharge you when you travel abroad, then there is a movement towards allowing this to continue. Within the EU, politicians stepped in and said that if we are to be a unified market, we must also be able to call each other throughout the EU without being ripped off.
Another movement is that phone manufacturers have realized that people want to be able to use multiple numbers at the same time, which in turn gives the telecom companies in the countries we travel to an opportunity to capture the revenue that would otherwise go to Swedish telecom companies.
There was a similar movement in the health sector, where people wanted easier ways to contact health services, such as making appointments themselves. The regions were too slow and rigid, while My Doctor and Kry saw an opportunity to step in. And we love it, so much so that the regions say in unison “can we do that?”. and want to impose restrictions.
Things to reflect on
- What is it in your business that you think is a safe bet, where you see that you will be able to continue year after year with the same recipe?
- Which of these could be done better by someone else who thinks differently?
- Are any of your products or services that customers may perceive as “unnecessary costs”?
Not an easy exercise to see yourself from the outside, but a necessary one.
Take a moment to reflect on the questions. Write down the answer and come back to the questions and your answers after a week or so. Then your mind will have matured and you will be able to see it even more clearly.
These questions are directly linked to the nine MEGA trends that we at Clean Stream teach about and also help businesses go through.
Don’t forget to reflect on the questions above, so you don’t get caught out by someone else thinking differently and “knocking your legs out from under you”.
Greetings,
Matts
