Delayed flights, lost luggage, middle seat, airline goes on strike while you're on vacation? These are just a few of the pains people experience when they travel. I can tell you as a Canadian, that you don't know travel woes until you travel as a Canadian with your smartphone. The big three (Rogers, Telus & Bell) have obscene roaming rates. So when the Kevin, Bla1ze and myself travel to WES/DevCon/BB World with our BlackBerry smartphones we are making a huge sacrifice for you the CrackBerry nation. Rogers charges $6.14/MB in the US, if you think that is bad when our fearless leader travels to Barcelona for Mobile World Congress he is billed the bargain basement rate of $30.00 per megabyte.
The carriers offer packaged bundles for short periods of time to help remove some of the burden of the roaming costs, but who knows how much data is used? I find when I travel my data use increases with all my Facebook or Twitter photo uploads (can't let an opportunity to show off what I am eating for dinner) plus all the glorious FourSquare check-ins to earn more and more badges. With these carrier bundles when you've exhausted the bucket you go back to pay-per-use.
Rogers however, has introduced some good news. They have introduced alerts to keep you current on your roaming data usage as well as lower cost travel data passes. This is a decent start to help ease some of the data roaming pain. Looking forward to see how it helps for DevCon and CES.
More information at Rogers Redboard