12 January 2024 , 11:56
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Since Brexit, many Brits have been caught out by new rules that mean you pay to roam abroad - one devastated traveller found himself slapped with a £200,000 bill during a four-day holiday.
Luckily, there are apps that are designed to help you roam in countries across the world for a fraction of the price of traditional telecom providers.
I discovered this incredibly useful information while on a trip to Turkey. Confronted with the alarming realisation I was about to spend £40 extra on phone usage for a five-day holiday, I used the hotel WiFi to search for alternatives and found Airalo.
The app is downloaded onto your phone and then allows you to choose the country you're in and the package of data you want. I plumped for the smallest and cheapest, assuming that it wouldn't work and so wanting to minimise my losses.
For $4.50 (£3.54) you can have 1GB of data lasting a week. The process of switching from my normal sim to the e-sim took about five minutes and had me rummaging around unfamiliar parts of the settings section of my phone.
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As easy as the process was, it became slightly nerve wracking when I disconnected from the WiFi and set out into the world. With no bundle pre-bought from my normal provider, it was difficult to shake the feeling that I was inadvertently clocking up an astronomical pay-as-you-go bill by roaming my way around Istanbul.
E-sims mean you don't have to buy expensive bundles (Shared Content Unit)Very happily, I discovered at the end of the trip once logged into my EE account, I had not. The whole five days of bountiful data had cost the same as two Pret filter coffees. If you buy the biggest package, $13 (£10.24) will get you 20 GB.
The one drawback is that calls and texts are not included, but that isn't too much of an issue if you can dial pals through WhatsApp. There are plenty of other e-sims providers to choose from which may be better or worse than Airalo, including Airhub, AloSIM, Nomad, Instabridge, BNESIM, Holafly and GlobaleSIM.
Given that most countries in the world are covered by some or all of these providers, and the sometimes eye-watering cost of using a traditional telecom company abroad, the use of these services is very clear to me. It is important to note that not all phones are e-sim compatible, with older models less likely to be able to use the software.
Without buying a bundle, calls cost £2.34 a minute to make and receive on EE in Turkey, texts 76p each and picture messages 83p. The network charges £7.84 a day for 500mb, which can be easy to burn through. That's roughly two and half hours of podcast streaming or 250 web pages loaded.
As one unhappy customer wrote online last year: "EE's roaming charges for Turkey are extortionate. £7.84 a day for 500MB, so a 10 day holiday is going to cost you an extra £78.40 on top of what you pay monthly."
While Turkey is not in the EU and therefore not covered by a 2017 bloc-wide law that made roaming, text, and calls free in all Member States, since the UK left the bloc British residents do not benefit from the excellent deal.