With modern smartphones, travel is a lot easier than it used to be. The Android or iOS supercomputer in your pocket has all the crucial apps and baked-in features to smoothly reserve hotel rooms, navigate cities, translate signs through the camera and pay for goods and services. You can even translate conversations in real time with AI-powered tools as well as ask your AI-powered assistants for travel tips.
But all those fancy phone features and apps require a data connection, which is included in your domestic phone plan but typically costs extra through roaming fees when you travel beyond your home network. Here’s how to avoid those charges.
First and foremost, you’ll want to understand how pricey those extra charges are or whether you’ll be traveling to a region that’s cheaper or free with your carrier. Some mobile carriers have partnered with carriers in other countries for more-affordable roaming or even free service, albeit with some restrictions. For instance, some plans, such as T-Mobile’s Essentials, have free service in Canada and Mexico but only at slow “2G” and “3G”-like speeds, so don’t expect to stream a lot of video with that connection.
But traveling to most countries will require you to pay mobile roaming charges if you try to use data services, make voice calls or send text messages on your phone as normal. If that’s your plan, check out our guide for the best travel phone plans.
If you want to avoid mobile roaming charges, keep the following tips in mind.
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Getting mobile service directly from a local carrier
Before carriers got friendlier with their international agreements to support each other’s customers, one of the better traveling strategies was to get service straight from the carrier in the country you were traveling in. Once you landed, you’d just walk into a local carrier’s retail store and get a prepaid SIM card to last you the length of your trip.
That’s still possible today but it’s a bit more complicated. If you have one of the many phones that lack a physical SIM slot, including the latest iPhone 15 series and Samsung Galaxy S24 series, you’ll have to register for service through one of the eSIM accounts on your device. It’s pretty easy to do and is in fact one of the benefits of having multiple digital eSIM slots — so you can have one for domestic use and one for traveling — but it requires you to register through the carrier in question. You can even load the eSIM before you travel, through apps such as Airalo and Ubigi.
Unfortunately, there’s something else to consider: whether your phone is unlocked, that is, not tied to a carrier and restricted in using eSIMs from other carriers (even international ones). If you bought your device unlocked, you’re in the clear.
If you’re paying off your phone in installments from your carrier, it’s complicated. Verizon users have it best, as their installment plans unlock phones after 60 days. AT&T and T-Mobile, however, require you to finish your installments and fully pay off your phone to unlock it. Because AT&T’s plans have a minimum of 36 monthly installments, customers may be out of luck getting a local carrier eSIM unless they’re nearing the end of their contract — in which case it may make sense to pay the balance for more travel freedom.
Relying on a hotspot and tethering
Another method to avoid roaming is a bit more roundabout and requires you to sign up for service with a local carrier anyway but you won’t have to fiddle with eSIMs. When you land in your country of travel, you can rent a mobile hotspot (or register service on one you already own), which is a handheld device that turns cell signals into Wi-Fi.
Note that you’ll still need to pay for service either from the hotspot maker or from a local carrier, and there’s no guarantee that their networks will play nicely with a given hotspot device. Check that it’ll work in the area you’re traveling to.
Once you have one set up, you just connect to the hotspot’s Wi-Fi using your phone as normal. While it’s a bit more cumbersome, this also lets you get internet for your other devices, such as tablets and laptops, pretty much anywhere you get a phone signal from a local carrier.
Another caveat is that you’ll need to keep the hotspot itself charged, which is another device battery you’ll have to worry about. It might be worth carrying an external battery to make sure your hotspot can last a full day while you’re out and about.
Ultimately, whatever option you choose should fit your travel habits and destinations. Some carrier partnership options will be more appealing but offer slower speeds than getting service straight from the local carrier. But don’t worry about getting locked into a choice: You can always try out one way when you arrive and switch to another if a better choice presents itself.
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