sim/e-sim cards

I've used Airalo's e-SIM on a few trips and it has worked very well. It's data only but on my phone I was able to configure it so that my normal SIM was active for voice and text, while all data used the Airalo esim

I have an android (samsung) but it's also doable on iphone as I understand.

Sorry but to piggy back on this question, what could you use in all of Europe maybe? We will be in Spain, Germany, Austria, and Italy.

Whatever product you get should work everywhere in the EU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roaming_Regulation_2022

Note: lots of people in italy/greece/etc use whatsapp for texting and voice calls. They do this because SMS texting is priced at a flat rate and not unlimited for many phone plans. I recommend downloading whatsapp before your trip in case hoteliers or whoever need to contact you by text

Same as edwardius, this last trip I used Airalo esIM for mobile data. It worked seamlessly everywhere I traveled and was not too expensive.

And then I used my regular physical SIM for phone calls and texts. I had almost no phone calls, and dealt with very few texts as I just used WhatsApp mostly which is connected through the eSIM.

Basically, any modern smartphone can run a physical sim and an eSIM at the same time.

It would have been very expensive to use mobile data in Europe from my normal carrier, Mint Mobile. The couple of calls and maybe 30 or 40 texts cost me under $3 in international roaming fees.

I posted a question about eSims recently and got an excellent suggestion to check out the Tech forums. One post that I found really helpful was this one that included an interesting "hack". Thought I'd pass it on.

Thanks melrowgo! That's an awesome hack!