TravelPass Was Step One. Here's What Mature Mobility Programs Do Next

When I review mobility invoices from major North American carriers, one pattern jumps out every time: the biggest international roaming spend usually isn't pay-per-use data. It's the flat daily passes.

TravelPass, International Day Pass, "IDP" or whatever the label, the model is the same: a fixed daily fee that lets employees "use their phone like at home." For Verizon and AT&T, that's typically around $12 per day per line in most destinations, with variations for Canada/Mexico and special cases unless custom plan is negotiated. Over a short trip, that's smart protection. Over months, it quietly become one of the largest and most overlooked drivers of your wireless costs.

This article is for leaders who've already taken the sensible first step by turning on day passes to stop horror story roaming bills and are now asking the right next question:

What do we do once day passes are no longer enough?

State 1: Day Passes as Essential Damage Control

Putting employees on a daily pass is a rational first move.

Without it, a single traveler can generate thousands in pay-per-use roaming for a few hundred megabytes of data. I've seen real invoices where under 0.5 GB of international usage turned into more than $1,000 in charges, effectively several dollars per MB. That's not poor user behavior; that's a risk control failure.

Daily passes solve that:

• Predictable cost.

• Fewer billing shocks.

• Simple experience for the traveler.

For short business trips, they're exactly the right tool. But many enterprises stop here. That's where the waste begins.

Stage 2: When Protection Becomes Persistent Waste

The economics change completely when a "traveler" stops being a traveler. Look at your last 3-6 months of invoices and pull a simple view:

• Line by line day-pass counts per month

• Destination country (many carrier invoices will show this)

• Trend over time

What you will often find:

• Employees showing 20-30+ day-pass charges every month

• The same destination country repeating for multiple cycles

• Teams with "permanent TravelPass" patterns in places like Europe, LATAM, or APAC

At this point you are no longer paying for travel convenience; you are funding an unofficial, extremely overpriced international plan.

A line hitting $300-$400+ in day-pass charges month after month is a red flag: that person is likely relocated, on long-term assignment, supporting a regional office, or effectively living on the road. Treating them like a casual traveler is a policy failure, not a user issue.

State 3: Turn Data into Decisions

The remedy is not complicated. It just requires looking at the data with intent.

A practical, management-level approach:

First, define what "chronic" looks like for your organization. For example:

• More than 10-15 day-pass days in a month, repeated over multiple months, or

• More than 20 days in the same country over any rolling 60-90 day window

Second, operationalize the review:

• Use your invoice detail (or TEM platform) to flag those lines automatically.

• Add country codes so you can see who is effectively based where.

• Route the flagged list to HR, management, or your mobility owner for validation:

  • Has this user relocated?

  • Is this a long-term project?

  • Is this role now region-based?

This step alone usually surfaces a small population responsible for a disproportionate share of your roaming spend and give you a defensible story when you act.

Stage 4: Redesign the Service for Long-Term Roamers

Once you've identified chronic day-pass users, you have options that are both simple and more cost-effective than letting passes run indefinitely.

Typical patterns that work well:

Local SIM or eSIM for relocated or long-term staff

If an employee is effectively living in another country:

• Provide a local in-country SIM or eSIM with an appropriate plan.

• Keep the original home-country line on a minimal plan, suspend it (if policy allows), or limit it to WiFi/MFA use.

• Remove or disable day passes and data roaming from the home-country SIM to prevent accidental charges.

This model reduces monthly cost significantly, improves user experience with local coverage and numbers, and eliminates the "$360+ every month in TravelPass" problem.

Trevel eSIM for heavy but genuine travelers

For staff who move between multiple countries but constantly trigger passes:

• Use an international eSIM or roaming data bundle for the bulk of usage.

• Turn off automatic triggering of carrier day passes where possible.

• Educate users how to select the correct profile so they're not double-paying.

In both cases, the message to leadership is the same: you're not taking anything away from users. You're matching the connectivity model to reality instead of paying emergency pricing forever.

Stage 5: Make It Policy, Not a One-Off Cleanup

To keep savings and avoid backsliding, formalize a lightweight governance model:

• Define threshold where a line must be reviewed.

• Define who approves moving a user to a local plan or eSIM model.

• Define when day passes are appropriate (short-term travel) vs when they are not (repeated, long-term use).

• Communicate expectations clearly so employees understand day passes are a safety net, not a permanent lifestyle product.

This doesn't need to be bureaucratic. A simple quarterly review based on clear triggers can remove a significant amount of waste while keeping your travelers fully supported.

The Message for Management

If you're a leader responsible for mobility or technology expenses, the takeaway is straightforward:

Enabling TravelPass or International Day Pass was the correct first step. It protected your organization from uncontrolled roaming bills.

But mature cost management requires a second step: use your own data to spot when that protection turns into structural overspend, and then move those users to smarter solutions such as local SIMs, eSIMs, or right-sized plans that reflect how they actually work.

You don't need to spend less on connectivity by making employees suffer. You need to spend differently by aligning tools, policies, and behaviors with reality instead of convenience pricing.