My daughter is in Germany now for three months, and we got her an eSIM. They are ridiculously cheap and straightforward to install.
I use eSIMs when I travel, including going to Italy last summer.
For the minimal cost of them or other options, having Internet, map, translate and other apps makes travel so much easier.
WhatsUpp is very widely used in Europe. Free when you’re on wifi. When I visited the US recently I was also able to buy a ‘travel’ add on to my phone contract (a capped price per day), which cost about the same as getting an eSim without the hassle - does your provider offer anything similar?
Yes. This is why I won’t use it unless forced, and I still haven’t given it my contacts. So, if someone wants me on WA, they have to reach out to me.
You can’t start a conversation without giving it your contacts. Or, at least, I’ve been unable to do so.
Not my experiance. You start a conversation by sending an invite out to a phone number while in the app, not by letting Whatsapp into your contacts.
When I click on the new chat icon on the lower right, a pop-up says “To help you connect with friends and family, allow WhatsApp access to your contacts”. If I say “Not now”, it just goes back to the previous screen, no option to enter a phone number.
Re: “airplane mode”
I would advise to disable roaming instead.
That way you might be able to receive emergency alerts and place emergency (112 in Europe) calls.
I agree but not all cell phones can use them. Not even most (although I expect them to become the norm soon…i.e. the next few years).
As others have said, airplane mode on, cellular data off and then use wifi. It will most likely be free where you are staying AND in most cafes/restaurants. This makes it easy to check the map if needed while stopping for a drink. I have found if I need to see a destination it is very easy to take a screen pic of the map while connected. You can then look at the picture on your phone and follow the map.
And as mentioned, it will ask to download your contacts but just say no and you are all set.
Also, I can’t remember what the charge from AT&T for international calls and data on my last trip but it was similar to the $10 a day mentioned upthread.
It’s not asking to download your contacts, it’s asking to pick one to send the invite to. If you don’t want to do that you can create a new contact.
It wants access to my contacts. I don’t want to give WhatsApp access to my contacts, so I can’t start a message. I can reply to messages that other people start with me, but I cannot initiate them.
Does it give you options, such as “Just this time”? As mentioned, it wants to pick one of your contacts, not all of them. I think that’s how the app works - not sure if you can just start a new chat on it with just a phone number.
If you & your US friends are iPhone users, iMessage, Facetime Audio and Facetime Video also only use your data connection so you can communicate back home without requiring them to install any additional apps.
It gives you the option to create a new contact to send the invite to, not access to your present contacts.
No. It asks for access to my contacts and when I say no, it just goes back to the charts page.
Not in Android if you haven’t already given it access to all your contacts.
I just tried recording my screen, but you can’t tell where I’m pressing. So, I go to the Chats page, click on the new chat, a pop-up asks for access, I say no, and I’m back on the Chats page.
If you don’t want to give access to your contacts you can have someone message you and that will start a conversation. That’s the way I have it set up with a friend who is in Belize.
If you don’t want the app to scrape all your contacts (it’s owned by Facebook, after all), you can consider using the web app too: https://web.whatsapp.com/
I don’t know how it handles contact adding there, but it wouldn’t have the same permissions to access your phone contacts as a real mobile app would.
Or you can make a new Android user on your phone, with its own contacts that you manually add one by one, and use Whatsapp only with that user…
OP, what is your US carrier? If it’s T-Mobile there’s a pretty good chance you will have free low-speed data in Europe, and maybe even high-speed data, plus cheap calls. Regardless, dial 611 before you leave and ask them what your options are.
For T-Mobile and other US carriers, Wifi Calling is another option, if your phone is fairly new. Like others have said, put the phone on airplane mode, and make sure wifi is on. Then if you want to call your family or contacts from somewhere you have wifi, you can. The call goes over wifi. A lot easier than WhatsApp, which your contacts will need to have.
The key benefit of WhatsApp is that other people have it in certain areas, like Europe and Asia and pretty much everyplace but the US. When in Asia a year ago, I made a hotel booking on Booking.com, and was immediately contacted on WhatsApp by the hotel manager who wanted to know if I wanted to book a car service to her hotel!
I used eSims in Europe last trip, and highly recommend them. I used Airalo - you can get the app, shop for the right country and duration on the app, and install from there. It’s nice to have data via eSim because you can use Google Maps on the go. You need a newer phone. You also won’t have a local phone number like you would if you purchased a physical sim from a phone store while in Europe. But most times you won’t need that.
That’s what I have. It turned out that wifi and WhatsApp was enough, so I never used it and never got charged.
Another option was that when we went to Hong Kong, the hotel gave us a phone for the duration, for free. This was a hotel mostly occupied by Chinese, not Western, tourists, so I don’t know if this was done for the classy hotels. I just figured that everything I did was sent to the Chinese government (this was before things got really bad there) so I was careful.
I briefly mentioned this earlier upthread, but I wanted to explicitly recommend this to anyone who is based in the US but frequently travels overseas: Google Fi is Google’s wireless plan (edit: link has referral code that takes some $ off your first month).
It’s an incredible service with unlimited data and texts in 200+ countries (and calls are 20¢/min while overseas). Starts at $65/person/mo for 1 person on the plan and goes down from there, and they have pay-as-you-go plans too. So comparable to other major US carriers, but with much much better international roaming rates.
Fi is a MVNO, meaning Google doesn’t operate their own cell phone towers but rather piggybacks off of T-Mobile’s (in the US) and other partnered carriers when overseas. But it’s much cheaper than T-Mobile’s own first-party plans, especially for frequent international usage.
Using Fi means your data just keeps working the minute you get off the plane, at no additional charge. Need to call an Uber or look up Google Maps? No need to fiddle with sketchy wifi, your data just keeps working like it does back home.
You also keep the same phone number everywhere in the world (unlike SIM-card swapping). This is good for your US contacts, but not so great for your international contacts because they end up having to text your US number as an international text, which may cost them more… but nobody outside the US really uses SMS texts anyway; it’s all WhatsApp/Line/WeChat/Telegram/etc. (which you can also keep using without wifi, because of the unlimited data).
I’ve had it for maybe 10 years and the customer service has been good (one of Google’s few offerings that actually has customer service), and the service has been good in the countries I’ve tried it in (Iceland, Finland, Japan, Taiwan, the US). The data service works flawlessly and instantly, and the speeds are fine (not blazing fast, but totally adequate for normal usage).
It works great on my Pixel. It will work on other Androids and iPhones too, but depending on the particular radios a given phone has (the supported frequencies), international roaming will be slightly different from country to country – in terms of coverage and speeds, not pricing.
Overall, it’s just much simpler than having to constantly swap SIM cards and phone numbers. You can port over your existing phone number in a few minutes, or if you have a dual-SIM phone, you can add another Google Fi plan and pause/resume it as necessary (they prorate on some plans, or at most you pay for a month of unlimited). No contract or cancellation fees.
It’s one of Google’s lesser-known offerings, but it’s a really great service.
That’s the one I use. They are really cheap, 3 GB is only $10 for Germany, for example, and their Eurolink for all countries is only $13.
You need to make sure your phone can handle eSims.