Airalo: eSIM Travel & Internet 4+

It’s great to be connected!

I bought a new iPhone SE last fall and my physical sim from my old phone was fighting with an eSIM that I must have downloaded from my carrier so I had no phone service. I went to my service provider to find out what was wrong and they reinstalled the eSIM and told me to wait 24 hours for it to become active. 24 hours later there was no change. I ended up removing my SIM card and I now had a phone that worked.
That got me interested in eSIMs since I saw ads about using them in other countries. I had a trip to Australia and New Zealand coming up but still wasn’t sure they would work. None of my traveling friends used them.
After being in Australia for 5 days living on public WiFi and trying to do Geocaching Adventure Labs I decided $14 wasn’t too much to lose so when I got to New Zealand I signed up and downloaded my first eSIM. It installed right away and after turning a few things on or off I was ready to go. When we got back to Australia for a few days I bought the Australian eSIM which I should have done right away.
I was traveling with 4 other people and became the go between since I was the only one connected. I told them next time we take a trip we will all have an eSIm.
I have a trip to Switzerland coming up and my husband will be getting a new iPhone so he can have an eSIM too and be connected.

Useful with some quirks

Update: Airalo has gotten back to me with some suggested items such as a global SIM which can be used. I’ll try them out.

I’ve used this on two trips so far, one to Germany and another to Japan (I live in the US). iPhone 14 pro max has no sim slot so I’m stuck using eSIMs. The good is that you will get data connectivity. I had no problems activating the eSIM and using them. Everything worked ok and even my US provider worked via cellular data. Pricing is ok. Not great but ok. But this app has an appeal to those who want an easy on-ramp to getting connected to many countries. Now the quirks. In Tokyo Japan it connected only at 4G. Not even LTE, but 4G, as in 3G that is labeled as 4G. This was with SoftBank. That’s fine for google maps and other stuff but it’s not very fast. The other eSIM app I used, Ubigi connected via 5G and was pretty fast. You don’t get a native in country sim in some cases. This mostly won’t matter but it could mess with geofencing and geolocation via IP. For example in Japan my eSIM was from Singtel and as such some apps thought I was in Singapore. In Germany it used a SIM from Play (Poland) and some apps thought I was in Poland. The final quirk is that for each country you need to install the eSIM. Some apps like Ubigi just let you install one eSIM and just add in data packs. This one you need to install a SIM for each country. If you travel a lot you could end up with a lot of eSIMs.

Developer Response ,

Hi there! We want you to know that we appreciate your feedback. It will allow us to resolve any problems and help us improve our services. We are proud that you have selected our company as your service provider. We now have a new Global eSIM: https://www.airalo.com/global-esim. The Global eSIM covers 130 countries and is installed only once.
It allows Data, Calls, and Texts. We look forward to helping you stay connected on all your future trips to come!

Works Great

This is my first time using Airalo eSIM and it’s great. I got myself and my partner the euro eSIM for the whole region. We’ve been in Germany and Amsterdam and it’s working great. I got 5 GB of data for 30 days. Our trip is 16 days. We are driving everywhere and using GPS to do it. So far we’re a week in an I still have a little over half my data. My partners data is still in the upper 4s. I will definitely be using their eSIM again. We usually get SIM cards in other countries to help with navigation and translation but this was by far the easiest choice. We landed and had data right away. The only slight uh-oh moment where we lost data was when we crossed the border, but because I had already read reviews saying that you have to choose your network when crossing borders it was an easy fix and we got the next network chosen after turning the phone on an off again. After that no problems and the data has worked great. I even used hotspot for a bit for a movie for my kids on my laptop and it worked great. I love the ease of buying it online and not having to go anywhere. I will try it again in Vietnam in a month and hopefully it’ll work just as good there.