We Used Airalo’s Discover Travel eSIM in 51 Countries. Here’s What We Found

I’ve been recommending travel eSIMs to readers of this site for a long time now, after ditching physical SIMs on almost all of my trips for the last two or three years.

Being connected as soon as I arrive in a new country is so much more convenient than lining up at airport kiosks or hunting down SIM card stores that I’d happily pay a premium for it. In much of the world, though, for the amount of data I use, it’s about the same price if not cheaper anyway.

In the past, I’ve just bought individual eSIMs as needed. That’s fine for most of the trips I take, where I only visit a few countries and stay in each one for a while.

On my most recent trip late last year, however, I knew I’d go to over a dozen countries in the space of three months, some for just two or three days. That was enough motivation to look at regional and global eSIM packages instead, from several different companies.

At the same time as I was starting to research global eSIM options, my friend Jonny Beardmore was doing the same thing for a much more ambitious trip: the Galapagos Postman Challenge.

Nicknaming himself the “Galapagos Postman”, he was about to set out on an epic 12-month adventure to raise funds for the fight against motor neurone disease. The idea was to collect 50 random letters from a historic postbox in the Galapagos and hand-deliver them all over the world…and he’d need to stay connected while he did it.

In the end we both settled on Airalo’s Discover eSIM, which covers 138 countries and territories for up to a year. It was an easy decision, since it was the only one from a reputable company that covered most or all of the places we both knew we’d visit, at a reasonable price.

I finished my trip towards the end of last year, and Jonny’s wrapping up his last few countries this month with a twist: people will vote on how he’ll get between each city, and what challenge he’ll perform while he’s there. It all finishes with a big party at the finish line in London on March 1!

Between the two of us, we’ve now used Airalo’s global eSIM in 51 different countries across six continents. If that doesn’t give us a good idea of how well it works, nothing will!

The Discover eSIM in a Nutshell

Put simply, Airalo’s Discover is a travel eSIM that lets you get connected in 138 countries and territories. There are two different versions, the data-only Discover, and the Discover+ that has a US phone number and a number of calling minutes as well.

Because Google Voice also gives me a US number and free/low calling rates, that feature of Discover+ wasn’t much use to me. As a result, the cheaper, data-only version made the most sense, and that’s the one both Jonny and I went for.

With that decision out of the way, we then just needed to decide how much data we wanted and how long we needed it to last. At time of writing, the choices looked like this:

I opted for the 180 day/10GB version, while Jonny went for the 365 day/20GB option that he renewed towards the end of his trip after using up all the data.

Purchase and Setup

Buying and installing the Discover eSIM is no different to any of Airalo’s other single-country or regional offerings. Pick the package you want on this page, create an account or log into one you already have, and pay using a debit or credit card, Paypal, or Alipay.

If it’s the first time you’ve used Airalo, enter the discount code NEWTOAIRALO15 on the payment screen for a discount. Either way, once you’ve paid, you’ll be taken to a page with installation instructions, and receive an email with a link to the same page.

I’ve bought eSIMs from many different companies, and Airalo’s instructions are some of the best. It’s amazing how often other companies get this fundamental part of the process wrong, but these ones are refreshingly easy to follow.

As with every other eSIM, you’ll need a reliable WiFi connection to do the initial setup. For that reason, I tend to buy and install my eSIMs ahead of time rather than waiting until I’ve arrived somewhere new.

If you’ve got another device to hand, the easiest way to install the new eSIM is to just scan the on-screen QR code using your phone camera. If you’ve only got your phone with you, use the manual installation details for your model instead, and copy/paste the network address and activation code as per the instructions.

Once that’s complete (it takes maybe 30 seconds to install), the eSIM is ready to use, but I left mine turned off until I arrived in Vietnam, the first country on my trip.

As I disembarked the plane, I disabled my usual SIM card, enabled the Discover eSIM, and configured it to use mobile data and roaming. I was connected to a local cell network before I got to passport control.

Real-World Experience

Below is a table listing all of the countries where Jonny and I went with the Discover eSIM, and a simple traffic light system to summarize the experience we had. Obviously it’s not going to cover every nuance of 450+ days of travel, but at a high level the colors mean:

• Red: speeds were regularly too slow to perform basic travel tasks like navigation and audio calls, and/or we often had service dropouts or other connection issues
• Orange: speeds were average or inconsistent, and/or we had some problems getting or staying connected in the places we visited
• Green: speeds were consistently fast everywhere we went, with few/no dropouts or other service problems
• No color: the country isn’t supported by the Discover eSIM

As you can see, the overall performance was impressive, especially for the price. Both of us had good service nearly everywhere we went, including Europe, North and South America, the Middle East, and much of Asia and Oceania.

Moving between countries, the experience was seamless. I’d put my phone into flight mode when boarding a plane in Malaysia, for example, and be connected within a minute of landing in Kazakhstan.

When crossing borders by land, it was even easier. Whether I was taking a bus from Albania to Macedonia, driving from the Netherlands to Belgium, or walking between India and Pakistan, my phone silently switched networks each time without me doing anything at all.

The only disappointment was in Africa, where Jonny struggled to get service at all in a couple of countries, and had average speeds and connectivity at best in the rest.

An interesting anecdote: while traveling in Vietnam, I discovered that the carriers that Airalo uses for its regional and global eSIMs aren’t always the same as those for its single-country versions.

At the time I visited, the global eSIM was only able to use the Vietnamobile network, which is easily the worst in the country and barely worked at all in Danang.

The regional and single-country eSIMs can connect to two other networks, both of which are far better. When I complained to Airalo, they gave me a credit to buy one of their single-country eSIMs instead, which worked around the problem during my stay.

By the time Jonny visited Vietnam a few months later, though, Airalo had added Viettel into the mix for the Discover eSIM. That’s generally the fastest network in the country, and he had no problems in Danang or anywhere else.

The reason I bring this up is that with any travel eSIM provider, your experience will have a lot to do with the local networks they’re using, both in terms of speeds and whether you get any service at all. I’m glad to see Airalo taking customer feedback on board and improving the experience when it can.

Combined with using Wi-Fi where possible, Jonny’s first 20GB eSIM lasted around eight months, when he bought the same one again. My 10GB lasted the length of my three-month trip, and I was able to use it again on a short trip to New Zealand before it expired.

Both of us occasionally supplemented our global eSIM with single-country versions, either because the Discover eSIM didn’t cover the country we were in, or because we needed to use a lot of data in a short period and it was cheaper to do it that way.

Verdict

Both Jonny and I ended up being far more impressed by the Discover eSIM than we expected to be, and would happily buy it again.

Easy to buy, install, and activate, and well-priced for what it offers, it worked in nearly all of the countries we visited, usually with good to excellent data speeds and coverage and with very little effort required on our part.

The lack of a phone number wasn’t an issue for either of us: with a mix of apps like WhatsApp, iMessage, Facetime, Skype, and Google Voice, we were able to contact anyone we needed to for cheap or free, including calling local and international numbers.

Not having to buy a new eSIM (or physical SIM) for each country saved us both time and money when arriving somewhere new, especially if we were only going to be there for a day or two.

The only caveat: we wouldn’t recommend it if most of your time will be spent in African countries, due to its generally poor performance there. To be fair, that’s not specifically an Airalo problem (other travel eSIMs we tried were no better), but even so, at least for now, local SIM cards remain the best option in most of the continent.

Elsewhere in the world, though, it’s a no-brainer for anyone who either travels regularly throughout the year, or knows they’ll be visiting a bunch of different countries on a single trip. If that sounds like you, be sure to check it out.

Reminder: if you’d like to learn more about Jonny’s Galapagos Postman challenge or support the fight against motor neurone disease, be sure to follow him on Instagram or visit the charity donation pages here and here. You can see his progress in real-time here!