The best eSIM for Europe
Europe is the one destination where a UK traveller should stop and ask whether they need a travel eSIM at all. For most other places the answer is obvious. For a week in Spain it very often is not.
Check your own contract first
Plenty of UK mobile plans still include EU roaming at no extra cost, and several UK pay-as-you-go packs include a chunk of roaming data across a long list of destinations. Three's pay-as-you-go range, for instance, includes roaming across more than 70 destinations with your UK calls and texts, though the roaming data allowance is much smaller than the UK one, so read that number rather than the headline.
If your existing plan covers you, a travel eSIM is a second thing to manage for no gain. Check before you buy anything.
When a travel eSIM does win
Three situations:
- Your plan charges for EU roaming, which many post-2021 UK contracts do.
- Your roaming allowance is small and you will burn through it. A few gigabytes disappears fast on maps and photo uploads.
- You are going somewhere outside the usual roaming zone. Turkey, Switzerland and the Balkans are frequently excluded from UK roaming deals and are covered by most regional Europe eSIMs.
The unlimited plans are capped, and the caps differ
As everywhere, "unlimited" in Europe usually means a full-speed allowance and then a slowdown. Airalo gives 3GB a day before dropping to 1Mbps. Saily's Europe plan gives 3GB a day, which is less than the 5GB it gives on several single-country plans. Ubigi caps the whole plan instead, at 25GB over seven days. Holafly does not publish a figure.
Regional plans also differ on which countries they cover. A "Europe" plan is typically 30 to 40 countries, and the borderline ones are the ones you need to check: Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, the Balkan states and the Channel Islands are all commonly in one provider's list and not another's.
Calls and a real number
Most travel eSIMs for Europe are data-only. The exception worth knowing about is Orange, whose European travel plans include real cellular calls and texts along with a European phone number, rather than only internet calling. If you need to ring a hotel or a hire car desk, that is a different product from a data eSIM, and it is priced accordingly.