Traveling to another country? Get an eSIM for your phone

by guest contributor Ken Korane

One of the essentials when traveling abroad is using your mobile phone to stay in touch. But relying solely on wi-fi at hotels and cafes is a bit limiting, while purchasing an international cell phone plan can be pricey.

A better option: buy an eSIM.

In 2024, our family took a two-week trip to Italy, Austria and Germany and our eSIM-enabled phones worked like a charm.

What is an eSIM?

For the technologically challenged like me, a SIM card lets a mobile phone access cellular networks. An Embedded SIM or eSIM, is a virtual, software-based device that requires no hardware installation and eliminates the problems when traveling outside the U.S. and you’re trying to connect to the internet from a smartphone.

Most newer phones can use more than one SIM. As long as your phone is unlocked (check with your carrier) it’s easy and cheap to add a second eSIM that lets your phone work abroad the same as it does at home.

Where to get an eSIM

Based on a little online research, we chose eSIMs from Airalo, a Singapore-based company. It sells local, regional and global eSIMs that offer data-only packages (for data and texting capability), or ones that include voice calls as well. Also highly rated are providers Holafly from Spain and the French-telecom Orange. There are dozens of other vendors selling eSIMs for single countries or larger regions.

Because I wanted to be able to make calls, I opted for Airalo’s Discover+ eSIM that gave me an Austrian phone number, 30 minutes of calling, and 3 GB of data over a 30-day period. It cost $36*. My son bought the company’s Eurolink all-Europe package with 3 GB of data, also good for 30 days. With a $3 credit from my purchase, my son’s price was only $10*. In contrast, our Verizon international plan would have cost each of us $10 per day, each day we used cellular data. 

How it worked

We downloaded the Airalo app, paid via credit card, and installed the eSIMs before leaving Cleveland. The instructions were pretty straightforward and set-up took about 15 minutes. When we landed in Rome we followed the instructions and switched our cellular settings to the new eSIMs.

How did it work? Really, just like home. To conserve data we mostly used wi-fi in our hotels. But when we were out sightseeing or hiking our phones automatically connected to the local cell network so we could use WhatsApp, Google Maps, Translate and other apps and even check weather radar for impending storms. When our taxi driver dropped us off near our hotel in Naples and we couldn’t find the entrance, a quick call to the front desk saved us a lot of hassle.

My only regret? I only used about 350 MB of data and made three phone calls, so my Discover+ purchase was really overkill for what we needed. Next time, I’ll buy a smaller, less expensive package, as it’s easy and economical to “top-up” data if you run low.

*Note: these were the prices in 2024 when this post was originally written. Like pretty much everything, prices have gone up. For comparison, in the spring of 2026, I purchased a new Airalo “Discover Global” eSim with 2 GB of data and 20 minutes of phone calling. It was good for 15 days and cost $17. It has a US (+1) phone number and works in 170 countries.