A few hours of video scrolling can consume close to a gigabyte of mobile data per hour, and on the wrong roaming plan that can turn an ordinary holiday habit into a devastating bill. That risk came into sharp focus after Manchester business owner Andrew Alty returned from a family trip to Morocco and found charges of about $52,000 on his phone account. The usage was linked to his daughter watching TikTok during the trip, a reminder that modern travel costs do not always come from flights or hotels. Sometimes they arrive later, hidden inside the terms of a mobile contract.
Morocco is a popular destination for British travellers, but it sits outside the European roaming zone used by many UK plans. That matters more than many people realise. O2 does not include Morocco in its standard roaming zones, and some plans there rely on limited passes or uncapped settings that can escalate quickly. On business contracts, the protections familiar to household customers may be weaker, leaving a much larger gap between routine use and financial damage.
Alty told The Telegraph he tried to make sense of the charges while travelling. I was traveling toward the desert. I called my operator O2 multiple times, but I couldn’t do much. I assumed it was a mistake or that someone had hacked my account, he said. He also said, They didn’t even try to warn us, they just watched the bill grow. I don’t know how they expect any small business to pay something like this.
The striking part is how normal the underlying behaviour was. TikTok is built around continuous video, and that makes it unusually data-hungry compared with text-led apps. Estimates vary, but guides on mobile usage put typical consumption at roughly about 948MB in one hour of scrolling, with other measurements placing it near around 1GB per hour in mixed-quality use. Auto-play, preloading and higher-resolution clips all push the total upward. A family member using the app casually on the road may have no visible sign that the meter is racing in the background.
This was not an isolated type of shock. In the United States, another traveller returned from Europe to a $143,000 roaming bill after using 9.5GB overseas. In both cases, the story was not really about unusual behaviour. It was about ordinary smartphone use colliding with contracts, roaming categories and missing safeguards.
There are simple habits that reduce the danger. Travellers can check whether a destination falls outside their plan’s protected zone, disable roaming before departure, stop background refresh on video apps and monitor app-level usage in phone settings. Video platforms usually deserve special attention because they stream continuously, and some also preload the next clip before a user chooses it. For longer trips, separating the home number from travel data can also help, especially when one line is reserved for calls and messages and the other handles internet access.
After media attention, O2 forgave the debt, sparing Alty from the full cost. The larger issue remains: a smartphone now behaves like a television, map, camera and travel guide at once, but many roaming contracts still treat data as if it were an occasional extra rather than the centre of daily use.
