eSIM for international travellers.

The largest segment of eSIM buyers are one-off international travellers: a couple on their honeymoon in Italy, a family on a two-week summer holiday in Spain, a university group touring Europe. The problem is simple. Home-carrier roaming costs too much, airport SIM booths are a time sink, and most travellers do not need anything more sophisticated than a working data connection.

For most leisure trips, a single-country plan at 5–10 GB for 15 days is enough. Regional plans only make sense if you cross 2+ countries — and even then, you need to do the math against buying multiple country plans separately. The break-even is typically around the third border.

The single biggest determinant of how much data you actually need is whether your accommodation has reliable Wi-Fi. Hotels almost always do. Airbnb apartments are mixed. Boutique guesthouses in rural areas often do not. If you know you will rely on cellular for most of the trip, size up.

A second factor is whether you will use offline maps. Google Maps now caches up to 1 GB of an entire region for offline navigation, which essentially removes navigation from your data budget. Setting this up before departure typically saves the average traveller 30–40% of their cellular usage.