Multi country SIM for Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland

A lot of folks on this forum have recommended the Orange Holiday Europesim card that’s available for $50 from Amazon and includes 10 gigs of data. It will work in the 4 countries you will visit. It’s valid for 14 days. You might want to compare this to the SIMs from UK Three also available from Amazon which are little less expensive. Before deciding on one make sure to read the restrictions that apply to the cards.

Since all of the countries are in the EU, a SIM purchased Lithuania will work, with no roaming charges, in the other countries. We always get a SIM on arrival in the first country we are visiting with a 30-day plan, which we renew if we are there longer. We paid 30 GBP last year for each 30 days with 8 GB of data and plenty of calling/texting.

Well, the Orange Holiday Europe sim card was available on Amazon (and it looked pretty good) but it's currently listed as unavailable there, with no info on when or whether it'll be back. Hmmm. I wonder if the current unavailability is a regular, limited-duration thing or if it's gone for good. Fortunately my trip is not for another month, but still... I will sit tight and check back regularly for a few days before going to Plan B.

I still recommend the Dutch Vodafone SIM I bought last year on eBay before leaving for France, Italy, and Slovenia, where it worked great. I used it again last week in Portugal. Someday, maybe I'll actually use it in the Netherlands!

Since last year when I first used it, they've doubled the data in their bundles, so you can get 6GB for a month for only 20 euros.

You can still buy it from seller "cheapeusims" - same one I used. Took about two weeks to arrive from the Netherlands. (I guess you could try to buy one at Schiphol while you are rushing through the airport trying to make your flight to Vilnius, LOL!)

For local voice calls in Europe, this isn't a great choice, though - you don't get any calls outside of the Netherlands as part of the monthly bundles, so you'd need to pay per-minute on the SIM. (Incoming calls and texts are free however, as with most European SIM cards.) But you can always use Google Hangouts or Skype for local calls - buy a block of credit for $10 USD and pay per minute for local calls, using WiFi or your SIM's mobile data. With Hangouts, calls home to the US are free, even to landlines. Just add a +1 in front of US phone numbers.

https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/tech-tips/dutch-vodafone-sim-card-for-use-in-europe

Yeah, I don't think we will be stopping at a shop while transiting AMS to buy a phone SIM - our plan is to be laser-focused on making that tight connection! Besides, previous efforts in Croatia and England and Sardinia to get connectivity all ended up with us stuck in shops for an hour or more each time. Things may be getting more efficient nowadays, but I'll either have things worked out before we depart or we'll wait to deal with until after we wake up the first morning in Vilnius.

I'll take a look at various options, including your suggested Vodaphone SIM, but I'm holding out hope that the Orange Holiday SIM becomes available again in a few days (since it's a fairly simple, reasonably cost-effective solution). It appears to have been very popular and was available the last time I checked less than a week ago, so I'm guessing/hoping it's just a temporary supply issue (everybody must be gearing up for summer trips).

Thanks for the suggestions.

I'm not sure why you think the Orange SIM was a better deal. Seemed expensive to me. The Dutch Vodafone SIM would cost you all of about $35 USD total for a month and 6GB of data. The Orange SIM makes more sense if you are going to France.

Admittedly a few bucks more ($50 versus $35). Maybe not a better deal cost-wise, but perhaps a little less complicated. Yeah, the Vodaphone gets you a month of service versus 14 days for the Orange. But we don't need a month, we need about 18 days (we can manage with the Orange SIM's 14-day limit, we won't need it for the first few days), so the extra days aren't really a differentiator. The Vodafone SIM sounds OK, but (if I'm reading your posts describing your experience correctly) more hoops to jump through to get it and get it set up. Not insurmountable, just more steps. OTOH the Orange SIM seemed pretty straightforward - just don't use it until you're ready for the 14-day clock to start.

Making voice calls is important to us (we want to be able make calls to/from Airbnb hosts for key hand-offs and other arrangements, etc.) and I think it would be more straightforward for that - I'd rather skip the voice-call-apps if that can be done without incurring a huge cost (I can imagine me driving through the countryside and having my non-technical spouse needing to make a call for us while in motion - I think she would prefer just "calling" rather than going through an app...). Not sure if this is necessary with Vodafone but that was the impression I got.

Not saying the Vodafone option is bad, it just sounds marginally more involved to set up and use. I still need to weigh the options (especially since the Orange SIM is not currently one of them ;) ).

I got the NL Vodafone SIM online per Andrew H's advice, installed it at home and bought a 30-day data/call/text plan for a 5-week trip to France and Germany -- put a little extra cash on to cover the costs of local calls and texts (€0.20/minute,€0.15/text) after the 30 day period. Just dialed European calls -- didn't use an app. (Used WhatsApp on hotel WiFi to keep in touch with family at home.)
The upside was that I knew the phone was ready to go the moment we got off the plane in Paris; downside was having instructions in Dutch (used Google Translate on my husband's phone to read stuff on my phone.)

David, if you change your mind and want to get the Dutch Vodafone SIM, I'm happy to answer questions you have about the setup. I've helped a few people use it. But I wouldn't wait too long to order it - if you leave in a month, I'd count on three weeks to be shipped from the Netherlands (even though it took only two to get to me - I'm sure shipping time varies).

You can get used to making calls with any app after you've used it a time or two. You can try them out at home first if you want. Or you can do what Laura did and add a little extra credit on the Vodafone SIM to make per-minute calls that aren't included in your data bundle. (calls are 20 euro cents per minute, 15 euro cents per SMS, though incoming calls and texts are both free.) You may find many AirBnB hosts are used to communicating with WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger and not even require conventional calls.