How much data do you actually need for a trip to Europe?

"How much data do I need?" is the single most common question before buying any eSIM plan, and the honest answer is: it depends what you're actually doing with your phone. The good news is that most everyday travel activities fall into a few predictable buckets, so you don't need to guess blind - you just need to know roughly where you land.

The cheap stuff: maps, messaging, and browsing

Navigation apps, messaging, and general browsing are the lightest things your phone does. An hour of active map navigation, a full day of messaging back and forth, and casual browsing together tend to add up to well under half a gigabyte a day. If this is most of what you're doing - finding your way around, keeping in touch, checking opening hours - you're in genuinely low-usage territory.

The moderate stuff: social media and photos

Scrolling social media and posting photos and short videos pushes your daily usage up noticeably - video-heavy feeds in particular use far more data per minute than static images or text. A day of moderate social media use on top of the basics above typically adds another gigabyte or so, more if you're posting a lot of video rather than just watching.

The expensive stuff: streaming and video calls

This is where data budgets actually get spent. An hour of music streaming is fairly light, but an hour of video streaming - even at a modest quality setting - can use several gigabytes on its own, and video calling isn't far behind for the same reason: it's continuous video, both ways. If your trip involves regularly streaming a show on a train, or hopping on video calls for work, budget for this specifically rather than assuming it'll blend into your other usage.

Hotspotting a laptop changes the maths entirely

Tethering a laptop to your phone doesn't use more data for the same task, but it does open the door to heavier tasks - video calls in a browser, cloud syncing, software updates running in the background without you noticing. If you know you'll be working from your laptop via hotspot for any part of the trip, treat that as its own separate estimate rather than folding it into your phone-only numbers.

Putting it together, roughly

Stacking these up: a light day (maps, messages, some browsing) tends to land under 1GB. A moderate day (the above plus social media and some music streaming) tends to land in the low single digits. A heavy day (regular video streaming, video calls, or a working day of hotspotting) can comfortably clear 2-3GB on its own. Multiply by the number of days on your trip and you'll get a rough total - though most people don't use data evenly across a trip, so it's worth padding the estimate rather than cutting it fine.

A few habits that cut your usage without changing your trip

Downloading offline maps and playlists before you leave home, on your own wifi, removes two of the biggest ongoing costs without changing what you actually do on the trip - the map still works, the music still plays, it's just not pulling data to do it. Setting apps to a lower default streaming quality also helps more than people expect, since a lot of platforms default to the highest quality your connection can handle rather than the lowest you'd actually notice on a phone screen. Neither of these costs you anything in experience; they just move usage out of the "billed" column.

If you're still not sure

When in doubt, the middle option tends to be the safer bet - it's why the Interrailer (20GB) plan is the one most people land on. It comfortably covers a week or two of the moderate-to-social-media-heavy usage most trips actually involve, without paying for headroom you won't use. If you know your trip is genuinely light on data (a short city break, mostly maps and messages) the Carry-On (10GB) plan will do it for less, and if you're working remotely or streaming heavily, the Data Hoarder plan is worth the jump. The GB calculator on the homepage does this same estimate for your specific trip length and usage style in a few taps.

Whatever size you land on, it's the same eSIM and the same 31 countries either way - see the full list on the coverage page.