Discount Codes
We’ll cut to the chase – if you’re just here looking for Saily or Airalo esim discount or coupon codes for your upcoming travel here you go. If you’re looking for a more detailed comparison to help you choose which esim is right for you, keep reading below!
Saily: https://go.saily.site/aff_c?offer_id=101&aff_id=10664
Use code CO2EU at checkout for 5% off
Airalo: https://airalo.pxf.io/c/6301586/2071037/15608
New customers use code NEWTOAIRALO15 at checkout for 15% off and
Existing customers use code AIRALOESIM10 at checkout for 10% off
Why Use an Esim?
One often overlooked expense when planning overseas travel is the cost of phone and data plans while abroad. In the past, we’ve opted to just pay the roaming fees to our U.S. carrier simply for ease of use, but those fees can add up fast and you’ll quickly be paying hundreds of dollars that you may not have planned for. And of course those fees multiply for each phone you’re bringing along.
You can also opt to purchase a physical sim card in your destination country when you arrive, but that comes with a whole host of other problems. You’re at the mercy of the prices in the airport where you land and it can be stressful finding a reputable provider at a fair price. Or if you wait until you’re out of the airport and in town, you’ll be stuck finding your way around a new city with no phone until you can track down a travel sim. Plus, if you’re planning to visit multiple countries on your voyage, you’ll have to repeat this process every time you enter a new service area!
Esim Basics
For this most recent trip (and because we hope to be traveling more after our move) we chose to take a different approach to our overseas cell plan: E-sims! An esim is an electronic sim card that you can install on many phones that saves you money on expensive roaming fees and offers incredible flexibility when traveling to multiple places. You’re also able to set them up before you leave home so it’s ready to go and automatically activates when you’re at your destination.
Generally, esim plans are pre-paid data only plans that allow you to quickly, cheaply, and easily connect to mobile data on your phone across the globe without having to purchase a physical sim card or deal with a local cell phone company in your destination country. The plans will usually include both a data use maximum and a time frame its active – for example a 1GB 7day plan will stop working when you either use 1GB of mobile data or when 7 days have passed since activation.
TIP: Since the plans are data only, you will likely not be able to use your SMS or other non-web based text messaging or phone calls while overseas. If you think you’ll need those services, be sure to set up message forwarding or other web-based call/text service before your trip.
We wanted to try out a couple different esim companies so each of us used a different company to compare the experience. Sarah used Saily on her Nothing 3a Pro and Greg used Airalo on his Pixel 9a. Below is our comparison of our experience using each service during our scouting 2 week trip in Europe. During that trip we spent time in 3 different service zones: Italy, Albania, and the UK over the course of 15 days.
Ease of Setup
Both Saily and Airalo
The experience was virtually the same for both apps. In both cases, setup was very easy, apps provided clear, easy instructions on how and when to setup the esim. It was nice that they were very clear about telling you to set it up in your home country before you leave (while connected to wifi), assuring you that the plan won’t activate until you arrive in the new country. They were both unclear (maybe we just missed it) that you need to activate roaming on the esim through the phone options (not the app) for it to actually connect, but it was an easy fix in the phone sim settings.
Plans and Features
Saily
Saily offers single country plans for nearly any country you can think of (There are a few omissions, North Korea, Eritrea, and Turkmenistan to name a few) with starting prices ranging from $1.99 to $59.90 depending on the country (prices also increase as data allowances increase). They also offer regional plans for Europe, Asia and Oceania, North America, Middle East and North Africa, Latin America, Africa, and Caribbean Islands. It’s important that you review the countries included in each regional plan and not make assumptions that the country you need will be included.
For example, in our case Albania was not included in the Europe plan (it essentially included the EU and UK only). Because of this, we opted to go for the Global plan at $16.49 for 2GB rather than a 3GB Europe plan ($12.49) for our Venice and London stops and a 3GB Albania plan ($8.99) for the bulk of our trip in Albania. The separate plans would have cost $21.48 and we didn’t want to risk any complications or confusion intermingling two plans. In the end, it was just cheaper and easier to go global.
One thing that sets Saily apart from competitors is at the top end of its offings, Saily Ultra. Unlike the other plans which are pre-paid, pay as you go data, Saily Ultra is a monthly subscription that at the time of writing costs $64.99 per month. That subscription not only comes with global esim support, but with a plethora of other perks that go along with it. As for the esim portion of the Ultra plan, you get 30GB of high-speed data, but unlimited data at up to 1Mbps after that is used up, and you automatically get that access in all 113 countries included in the pre-paid Global plan. For reference, the largest pre–paid global plan Saily offers is 20GB which will cost $66.99.
As for the other perks, Saily ultra includes subscriptions to other services owned by the parent company, including NordVPN, NordPass, NordLocker, and Incogni. It also comes with an adblocker and web protection to block malicious sites, trackers, and annoying ads while you’re online. And finally, you’re also offered some physical in-airport perks like airport lounge access and fast-track service at airport security and check-in lines. Both of these services are only available at select partner airports (a full list can be found on Saily’s site), and you’re only allowed one lounge pass and one fast-track per month. However, your passes do roll over if unused up to 3 at a time so if you don’t use them right away, you have some protection. Also, in the event your flight is delayed by 2 hours or more at an airport with a partner lounge, Saily Ultra will provide you with lounge access without using one of your monthly passes.
We haven’t used Saily Ultra ourselves so we can’t speak for how easy to use those bonus perks are, but if you’re traveling frequently and to a wide variety of places we can see the value in the plan for the esim alone, and the rest of the perks are just the icing on the cake. For most of us vacationers or occasional business travelers, though, the pre-paid plans will probably make more sense.
Airalo
Like Saily, Airalo offers single country, regional, and global pre-paid esim plans. The individual countries vary between the two services, but Airalo’s Global plan offers 137 countries and networks compared to 113 from Saily. Again, double check the service and plan for the specific countries you need before you purchase to avoid any unpleasant surprise interruptions to service.
One thing that we liked from Airalo is their more robust European regional offerings. While Saily only had one European regional plan that excluded Albania (one of the destinations we needed), Airalo offers an EU and UK plan PLUS a more robust all Europe plan that includes its non-EU/UK countries (42 in total, including Albania). This worked great for us as we didn’t need to upgrade all the way to the Global plan to get all the countries we needed like we did with Saily. We opted for the 3GB Europe plan at $13.00 to cover our stops in Italy , Albania, and England.
While Airalo does not have an answer to Saily’s Ultra perks, the do offer plans that include limited calls and text messages for their Global plans. These plans feel like a throwback to the 2000’s, though, as you’ll need to count your minutes and messages as you’re limited to 10 call minutes and 10 SMS texts on the low end and 200 minutes and 200 SMS messages on the high end. Having the option to have the full phone functionality you’re used to at home will certainly be nice for some users, but for us we felt like we could get by without calls and texts for a couple weeks.
Coverage and Zone Transitions
Both Saily and Airalo
Our experience with both companies was very similar and the experience was virtually indistinguishable between the two. While we didn’t run speed tests for hard data, we felt the data speeds were plenty fast on both plans and our phones ran just as well as they do on our regular phone service back home.
Changing between countries wasn’t even a thought with either service either. For both Saily and Airalo, it was as easy as switching off airplane mode as we deplane and after a short delay (usually 30-90 seconds) our phones would automatically connect to the network in the new country with no trouble at all. While 3 countries is admittedly a small sample size, it was encouraging to see that things simply worked how they were supposed to with both companies.
While on the ground, we didn’t really experience any dead zones anywhere we went. In London we lost coverage on occasion while riding the Underground, but while above ground everything was smooth. For Venice, we remained connected even while on open water between Venice, Murano, and Burano and in Albania we didn’t experience any coverage lapses in or while traveling between Tirana, Durres, and Vlora on the bus. Honestly, an A+ experience all around for both esims.
Topping Up
Saily
Saily allows you to use the app to manually top-up your plan and buy more data at any time while you’re abroad and also offers an auto top-up option if you’d rather not interrupt your relaxation worrying about your data use.
We opted to manually top up when needed as the auto top-up would make it too easy for us to let our data use (and therefore costs) get out of control. That’s the one gripe we had about our experience with Saily, though. We found that the low data warnings would come later than we’d like and we would be completely out or nearly out of data by the time we were notified. To be fair, though, we’re not entirely sure if that was a setting that we may have misconfigured or if that’s just the way it is so this is a minor complaint and could very well be user error.
Once you realize you’re in need of more data, though, topping-up is as easy as opening the app and selecting the amount of data you expect you’ll need for the remainder of your trip. For us, we were only running low on data for the final London leg of our trip so we were able to top-up on the UK single country plan rather than the Global plan we started on which saved us a little money.
Airalo
Just like Saily, Airalo offers manual and automatic top-ups and just like with our Saily phone, we opted for manual with Airalo, too.
The low-data notifications came in with 25% of the plan’s data allowance remaining and were in the form of both an email and a push notification. If you’re really trying to min/max your data use that could be kind of annoying as you’re using data to receive that email, but it’s such a small amount it won’t matter for most people. We also received another email a few days after we returned home letting us know our time ran out and our remaining data expired. It didn’t matter for us as we were already home, but it’s good to know they send notifications for both time expiry and data expiry.
The top-up experience was extremely easy with Airalo as well – just open the app and choose the amount of data and time you need to add. We used data a little heavier on this phone, so we had to top up in Albania and had to top up under the full Europe region to maintain coverage in Albania and our following stop in the UK.
Which Should You Choose?
Well, to be honest we didn’t have a meaningfully different experience with either company’s product – both did exactly what they were supposed to do and both were extremely easy to use (and most importantly, both were a cheaper, better experience than paying roaming fees!).
Our advice, start out by making sure each service offers coverage in the country or countries you need. If one does and the other doesn’t, there’s your answer.
If both companies service the area you need, consider if you have any special needs. If you’re a heavy traveler who would benefit from Saily Ultra’s monthly subscription over the prepaid plans or you’ll make use of the perks, that’s probably the best choice for you. If you feel like you’ll NEED call and SMS capability, you should probably go with Airalo’s global data/calls/texts option.
If you don’t fit either of those categories, just go on price. Maybe one company has a sale going on, a better regional plan for your needs, or is just simply a lower price for the country you need. For our money, all other things truly are equal so just let the dollars decide.
And if you want to save a little more, both companies offer discounts when you sign up with the links or code below!
Saily: https://go.saily.site/aff_c?offer_id=101&aff_id=10664
Use code CO2EU at checkout for 5% off
Airalo: https://airalo.pxf.io/c/6301586/2071037/15608
New customers use code NEWTOAIRALO15 at checkout for 15% off and
Existing customers use code AIRALOESIM10 at checkout for 10% off.
