Iphone

Who is your service provider?

T Mobile-no extra charge

As mentioned above, who is your service provider? How many days do you need service? And how do you plan to use your phone? Calls within Portugal, calls from Portugal to the US, texting or do you need mostly data for directions, bookings, social media and general googling?

Like Michael, our regular T-Mobile plan includes texts and data. Calls are 25¢/minute or we can use Whatsapp.

Most carriers have partnering companies overseas and the phone will automatically connect to a cell service. The local carrier will change depending on where you’re at, even within the same city. The first time your phone connects you’ll probably receive a text from your carrier informing you of what it will cost to make calls.

Try to get prepaid esim lke airalo or gomoworld.

If you can unlock your phone, the absolute cheapest is an ESim. As mentioned, Airalo, is great.

My plan through Verizon includes international so no extra fees. This is calls, texts and data.

I have consumer cellular. I spoke with them prior to coming out and was under the impression that I didn’t need to do anything…my bad, I’m sure

Consumer Cellular does have an international plan. In fact, Lyndashm, who posts here frequently and was just abroad, wrote a trip report telling about her travels, but also mentioned the Consumer Cellular Plan. See below:

Phone: I used Consumer Cellular international service and it worked great. This is the 3rd or 4th time with them and I’ve been pleased every time. I’m extremely phone dependent for navigating and looking stuff up while I’m out and about. I used 8GB during my 22 days and it cost $26. https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/trip-reports/amsterdam-in-february-trip-report

That said, I'm not sure that Consumer Cellular is correct ind that you don't need to do anything. I have T-Mobile, and when I travel internationally, I don't need to do anything. I get a welcome message when I enter a new country and get a certain amount of data to use, and phone calls are very inexpensive. But I seem to remember someone saying that with CC, you need to activate your international plan.

Hopefully someone here will be familiar with the plan and can help you out. If not, you might want to send Lyndash a private message asking her about it (just click on her name it and will take you there).

Edit: I will tell you that no matter what cell service you have, the best way to keep your costs down is to use wifi as much as possible, especially if you are sending photos or anything like that. If you're out taking photos during the day, wait till you get to your hotel room so you can connect to wifi before you send them to family or post them someplace. Also, if you're out walking around and you need to check for directions or the location of a sight, you can stop in a cafe and log into their wifi and then hook up to Google Maps or whatever GPS you use to figure out your next destination.

Hey Julie, I just sent you a pm. I hope you can get back on track.

I second @Mardee's comment about minimizing the use of cellular data. My family were in Azores twice in 2024 each for 8 days, and then Lisbon/Canary Islands for 7 days in 2025. I managed to use only <1 GB of data for the entire trip for all 3 trips. The only time I needed cellular data was for Google Map navigation, hailing Uber/Bolt, and maybe looking up some logistical info on restaurants/attractions.

The key was to disable any non-essential apps from refreshing/downloading/uploading in the background. The data hogs are any apps that send/receive photos and videos, such as social media sites or your own cloud storage. For instance, most people have their Photo Albums automatically synced to iCloud or Dropbox, so you take 100 pictures a day plus a few videos, that's easily a couple of GB of data. It's pretty easy to fix -- go into your phone settings, under Cellular, then Cellular Data Usage, you will see all your apps listed, and each can be toggled to turn off their ability to use Cellular data. As soon as you get back to the hotel or Airbnb at night, you are on free WiFi, and then these apps "come alive" and you can update them to your heart's content.

For all my trips, I used Airalo to install an eSim on my iPhone 13. For a 7 day trip, you can buy a 3GB eSim for $6.50 or a 10 GB eSim for $10. On top of that, I found a coupon code "MINFEI4587" (not including the quotation mark) that gave $3 off. There was no minimum purchase amount for the coupon code, so I bought a 3 GB eSim for effectively $3.50 and it was more than I needed for 7 days. (I just gave this code to a friend last month and he said that it still worked.) Therefore, even though another person on this thread said the phone company package cost only $22, that's actually still a lot more than what you would need to spend if you go with Airalo.

Good luck.