Ryan Haines / Android Authority
I still remember when my husband got slapped with an exorbitant €70 extra fee on his €10 basic mobile plan because he mistakenly went online for a few minutes during a layover in Turkey. Since then, avoiding roaming fees has been our personal crusade, especially since we like travelling and our basic local data plans have ridiculously expensive fees when we step outside of Europe.
Over the years, I’ve put together a three-prong strategy to avoid paying for roaming fees, and while these work very well for me when traveling out of France, they should also apply to you, no matter where you come from. If you’re in the US, my colleague Andrew Grush has specifically added a section at the end to help you make better decisions about using roaming plans versus eSIMs.
Just buy a good travel eSIM
Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
The best way of avoiding roaming fees is to have a local SIM, but that’s not always the most practical solution. This is why I’ve been singing the praises of eSIMs — or electronic SIMs — for four years now, and I’ll keep on doing that. Instead of spending hours researching the best prepaid operators and SIM plans in the country (or countries) I’m traveling to, finding a store that sells them near my airport or hotel, going there in person and waiting to buy a physical SIM while often providing ID documents, and then waiting for it to activate or figuring out how to do it in a bunch of foreign language messages or apps, I just buy a digital eSIM.
The benefit of travel eSIMs is immense. For starters, research is quick: I usually go to aggregators like Mobimatter, eSIMdb, or SimSurf to find the best plan for my trip in terms of days and gigabytes of data. I often gravitate towards Airalo for short stays or multi-country stops, Holafly when I need unlimited data to do some real work, and a few other carriers like GlobaleSIM or eSIMgo in different contexts. But if the provider or operator with the best offer is unknown to me, I’ll do a quick search to see what people say about their service and decide accordingly.
When I find the one I want, I buy the eSIM, install it on my phone in a few minutes, and activate it. All of this is done in about half an hour tops, from the comfort of my couch and before even leaving my home country.
An eSIM is almost as cheap as buying a local SIM and almost as convenient as using a roaming plan on your current SIM.
That ensures I’m ready the moment my train drives into a new country or my plane lands in a foreign airport. My new eSIM usually goes online in less than a few minutes, letting me coordinate Uber pickups, research my public transport routes, or simply tell my loved ones I’ve landed safely over WhatsApp or Google Messages.
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