Holafly eSIM in the UK
We took a trip to the UK recently, well we ended up staying only in London due to a medical issue with someone in our party, and used Holafly eSIMS on our trip. I was VERY pleased with the experience in using their eSIMs from setup to performance. I won’t go into any specifics on how to set them up, etc, as there are plenty of articles around that cover that. I’m simply discussing our usage on the trip and things I learned.
We have Verizon as our primary carrier in the US. I THOUGHT I would be able to keep the Verizon eSIM in my iPhone 14 Pro Max enabled while disabling data for the Verizon eSIM and only having data enabled on the Holafly eSIM. According to what I’ve read on Verizon’s site, we would only be charged for International Days IF we answered or made a phone call or sent SMS messages. Unfortunately, that didn’t seem to work for me. I had my phone all configured before we landed at Heathrow. Upon landing I took my phone out of airplane mode and was immediately greeted with a text from Verizon welcoming me to the UK and a $10 charge for the day. I triple checked settings and it didn’t make sense as the data on my Verizon eSIM was disabled. Not wanting to muck with it, I ended up turning the Verizon eSIM off for the rest of the trip, unless I was on WiFi and in airplane mode at the hotel. Disabling the Verizon eSIM and only running on the Holafly data eSIM worked fine BUT there are some gotchas.
When you disable the SIM/eSIM that has your primary number and you are using your primary number for sending/receiving iMessages, iMessage immediately stops working. You will see in Settings/Messages/Send & Receive that your phone number is no longer listed in the Receive or Start settings. So, for the trip I had to switch to using my email address. There were a few group conversations I wanted to keep going so I immediately sent messages out to the group with my email address as the source and let people know what was going on. Until you do that, anyone sending you messages won’t have their messages come through because they are sending to your phone number, which is disabled. Minor glitch but something to be aware of. If you use WhatsApp, no problem, it just keeps on working. So with things setup I could now message people, most importantly the people we were traveling with. Also, we used Find My amongst ourselves which turned out to be VERY beneficial when I checked on people heading back from dinner and discovered they got lost when they got off at the tube station. I was able to call them via Facetime and get them back on track.
I also have a Google Voice number setup and I added $10 in credit to it before we left. Calling in the UK was odd. We had one person in our party end up in the hospital for a few days so being able to call and get updates was very helpful and Google Voice worked great. The strange part was that calls to one number at the hospital were $.01/minute while calls to another number, direct line to the room, were $0.25/minute. No matter, having the Google Voice line and credit paid off. I highly recommend getting a Google Voice number for that situation. It’s also very handy to have a Google Voice number as the number for MFA sites, yes I know Authy or a similar tool are better but some sites ONLY offer SMS. With Google Voice as the number you will receive codes no matter where you are since it uses data. With my primary eSIM turned off, MFA codes sent to the number would only be accessible when I was in airplane mode on WiFi.
So, even though the Holafly card is data only, it’s very helpful to have IMO. I used Google and Apple Maps a lot for various navigation activities around London so I ended up using a lot of data. I looked at options to Holafly that had limited data that were cheaper. Turns out if I had used another option I was looking at I would have run out of data. No big deal as you can reload but I preferred simply having the unlimited data and not having to think about it. I will definitely use Holafly on future trips and recommend it to anyone traveling who wants to keep costs down, have access, and don’t already have a decent travel option(like T-Mobile offers natively.).