One in five reviews is one or two stars
Airalo is the largest travel eSIM brand in the world. On 1 October 2026 its Trustpilot profile showed a score of 4.1 from 44,131 reviews, with 16 percent at one star and 5 percent at two. That is one in five people who bought a travel eSIM and came back to say it went badly.
This is not an argument that one company is bad. Scale means visible reviews, and a brand with 44,000 reviews shows you the failure rate that smaller shops hide. The useful part is what the one star reviews actually say, because they do not say the price was wrong.
They say two things. The eSIM would not connect after landing, and the support channel could not fix it in time. A traveller in Italy wrote that there was no service when he landed in Rome and he bought a local eSIM at the train station instead. Another wrote that his eSIM and his wife's both failed in France. A third wrote that a refund was agreed and never paid.
Why it fails exactly when it hurts
An eSIM is a carrier profile that has to attach to a partner network when you arrive. Most of the time it attaches in seconds. When it does not, the reasons are mundane: the profile was provisioned against the wrong network, data roaming is off, the line was installed in the wrong slot, or the local partner is refusing new attachments that hour.
The problem is not the odds. The problem is the order of events. You find out at the airport, in a country where you have no data, and the only way to ask for help is a chat window that needs data to load.
That is why the reviews read the way they do. People are not angry about a ten dollar plan. They are angry that the fix required the thing that was broken.
A spare line turns a disaster into 30 seconds
The fix is not a better brand. It is a second line that is already in the phone before you leave home.
Every order on this site is a Duo pack, delivered in two separate emails. You install both on your own Wi-Fi before you fly, which takes about four minutes. You land, switch the first one on, and leave the second asleep.
If the first one shows no service, you open Settings, turn the first line off and the second on. Thirty seconds, nothing to download, nobody to ask, no support queue in a language you do not speak. The spare costs nothing extra.
What a spare does not fix
It does not help if your phone is carrier locked or has no eSIM support. Check for an EID before you buy anything, by dialling *#06# or looking in the eSIM section of your settings.
It does not help if the whole local network is down, which is rare and affects everyone including the people with local SIM cards.
It does help with the common failure, which is one profile that will not attach while a second one will. That is the failure in the reviews, and it is the one that costs you the first hour of a conference week.
The honest comparison
You can buy a second eSIM from any provider. Nothing stops you, and if you are already loyal to a brand you like, buy two of theirs rather than one.
The difference here is that the second one is included rather than charged for, and that the person who sells it answers messages himself on Telegram and X. For a two day conference where the whole week gets arranged in group chats, that is the part that matters.
Prices, coverage and speed ceilings are on the packages page, dated, with no floor price games.
Review figures read from Airalo's public Trustpilot profile on 1 October 2026. Review counts and scores change daily, and the quoted reviews are the reviewers' own words, not ours.