I’ve recently been fortunate enough to enjoy an extended family trip through Europe (UK, France, Germany, Italy and Greece). This gave me the chance to test out one of the new international eSIMs that have flooded the market over the past few years, which allows you to have mobile data roaming across multiple countries for a fraction of the cost of doing so with an NZ provider.
Use Case
My family (2 adults and 2 teenagers) were all keen to stay connected throughout the trip, primarily on our smartphones, with the occasional hotspot/tethering use to allow my wife and I to stay connected to work on our laptops. We didn’t need calls (but see the note at the end….) so it was unlimited mobile data we were interested in. We were travelling across multiple countries so we were looking for something easy to use and didn’t want the hassle of buying SIM cards in each country.
Selection
I compared a few providers from an internet search and Holafly seemed to have the simplest options, and was well reviewed. They weren’t as cheap as some of the others but their options were really well laid out and their mobile app was good. We paid around 100 euros (around $200nzd) for each eSIM that provided us 41 days of unlimited mobile data throughout Europe. When you sign up you choose the number of days and the cost is calculated then. You can add more days if needed once the plan has been activated. To some this might seem expensive but keep in mind these eSIMs provide unlimited mobile data. Compare this to something like Spark which offers just 2Gb for $35!
Setup
This was fairly straightforward and can be done in a few different ways. Once I created a Holafly account and ordered the eSIMs the instructions were really clear and the only thing we learned was that it’s important not to activate the Holafly eSIM until you travel, as the allocated days start counting down as soon as you do.
Of course, you need a phone that is capable of handling an eSIM, and to avoid roaming charges on your NZ SIM you should disable that before you leave NZ.
Usage
When we arrived at our first destination, it was a simple matter of enabling the eSIMs that we had each setup earlier on our phones. None of us had any issues connecting and the Holafly eSIM just connected to whatever network they obviously have partner agreements with. This was the case all across Europe in fact and I was really impressed with the ease of use. Connectivity and speed was generally good, apart from in really rural areas, which of course you would expect anyway. Moving from country to country was seamless, with only the occasional need to disable and re-enable the eSIM to get it to connect to the local network on arrival. Overall it worked really well for all of us and allowed us to be connected without worrying about racking up mobile roaming costs or finding wifi networks all the time.
Issues
We had problems with hotspotting in Greece. Everywhere else we were able to tether our laptops to our phones and had good enough mobile data to perform typical work tasks and even join a few Teams meetings. As I understand, the mobile networks in Greece are fairly poor anyway, and whatever network Holafly uses did not seem to support hotspotting. I tried several different things to get it to work but whilst the tethering itself worked fine, the laptops were unable to connect to the internet regardless. As I say, this was only a problem in Greece.
The only other issue that we had was something we hadn’t considered, and this was the lack of a mobile number whilst using the travel eSIM. Holafly and (from what I can tell) most of the other eSIM providers don’t provide you with a mobile number for calls or texts on their multi-country plans. This makes sense from a technical perspective as you are hopping from one mobile network to another, but what we hadn’t taken into account was the number of occasions that we needed to make or receive phone calls, or more importantly receive text messages. Everything from signing up to taxi services, booking hotels, paying for parking all rely on text verification and of course you can’t do this if you can’t receive texts! This was even more of an issue for the occasional time we needed to use our ANZ credit card which is setup for text validation for unknown transactions and unfortunately resulted in us having to enable roaming and buy roaming packs for our NZ mobile plans just so we could receive these verifications.
I’m not sure how to get around this as it seems in Europe that mobile verification is the default and preferred method for lots of things. To my knowledge ANZ (and other NZ banks?) also default to verification by text. Perhaps there are travel eSIM providers that do provide a mobile number as well as data?
Whilst this did reduce the value of the travel eSIM somewhat, and added a layer of complexity that I was hoping to avoid, I’m very confident that it was still significantly cheaper and easier than using roaming from an NZ provider, and something I would highly recommend if you are overseas for more than a few weeks and need lots of mobile data.
