216. Gotcha

From, “Stuck With a $10,000 Phone Bill,” by Scott McCartney, 4/18/12, The Wall Street Journal:

Flight attendant Chuck Harris made a few calls home to New York so plumbers could fix a broken pipe while he was vacationing in the Dominican Republic. To his surprise, he got a bill for $400—not from the plumbers, from the phone company.

John Ellis, an adjunct professor of anesthesiology and critical care at the University of Pennsylvania, returned home from a trip to China to a $2,367 phone bill for downloaded data, even though he carefully tracked his usage. And one Texas A&M University employee got an even bigger welcome home gift after a trip abroad: a $10,000 cellular data bill.

When in roam, be careful with your phone. Smartphones and tablet computers set to automatically update data can trigger hundreds, even thousands, of dollars in expensive roaming charges.

Data plans have become a more expensive travel gotcha than expensive voice-call rates overseas—as high as $5 or more per minute. Even if your phone checks the local temperature, that'll cost you. AT&T T +0.06% and Verizon charge up to $20 per megabyte, so uploading a few photos, downloading a few attachments or watching three minutes of YouTube video can easily cost $100; watching a full-length feature movie through an Internet-based service can be an $18,000 show ticket

Gotcha: Slang from ‘I got you.’ In this context, it means an annoying or unfavorable feature of a product or item that has not been fully disclosed or is not obvious.