Sim Local vs Lotsotravel: What the Airport Counter Adds to the Bill (2026)

Most eSIM comparisons pit one app against another. This one has a shop in it.

Sim Local has been selling travellers a working phone across a counter since 2011, when it opened its first shop at Dublin Airport. The eSIMs came later. That order of events explains nearly everything about how it prices: you are buying from a retailer with staff, leases and vending machines, and retail costs money. On the four trips we priced on 3 November 2026, that showed up as between 29% and 69% on the bill.

So the short version. Buy from Sim Local if you want a human in a terminal to sort your phone out, or a machine in Dublin Airport to do it at six in the morning. Buy from us if you are willing to spend four minutes on a website before you fly, because that is what the saving costs you. Nothing in the technology differs: both sell a data profile that rides a local operator's network, and the GSMA consumer eSIM specification both depend on does not care who sold it to you.

We are Lotsotravel, which makes this a comparison against a competitor by an interested party. Every Sim Local figure below links to the Sim Local page it came from, the subtraction is written out, and the section on what we did not measure is not a formality. If a number here disagrees with their site when you read it, their site is right and we want to know.

Who you are buying from

This matters more with Sim Local than with a pure-play eSIM brand, so it is worth two paragraphs.

Sim Local's own history page says the company was founded by the Irish entrepreneur Killian Whelan and opened its first retail shop in Dublin Airport in 2011. It won its first London Heathrow store contract in 2012. For 2022 it lists two stores at Athens International, three more at Heathrow, and new vending machines at Dublin. It says it is based in Dublin and London, and it sells through all of it at once: retail stores, kiosks, vending machines, a mobile app and the online store.

That is a travel-retail business that added eSIMs to an existing shelf, not an app company that discovered airports. It is a real advantage in a specific moment, the one where you have landed, your roaming is off and you would like somebody else to fix it. It is also a cost base that a website does not carry, and the prices further down are where you meet it.

For our side of the table: Lotsotravel is an independent travel eSIM provider covering roughly 190 destinations. There is no app and no shop. You buy on the website, the QR code arrives by email and on the website, and plans start from $4.95 USD. Support runs on WhatsApp and email, which is a channel list rather than a boast, and we are not going to compare it to anybody's.

Whose eSIM is in the cart?

Open a Sim Local destination page and you are not looking at one provider's catalogue. You are looking at a shelf.

Sim Local sells its own Sim Local-branded eSIMs next to other brands, and the brand is written into the product URL. A Sim Local United States plan sits on the same United States page as Lycamobile and Three UK plans, and the Europe page carries Orange plans sold under Orange's own name. Each brand prices its own plans and rides its own network arrangement.

The practical consequence is that "the Sim Local price for Europe" is not one number. On 3 November 2026 the Europe plan page listed Sim Local's own 10GB eSIM for 30 days across 36 countries at US$28.50, while an Orange-branded Europe plan on the same page carried 20GB for 31 days across 44 countries, with calls and texts, at US$22.50. Twice the data, a day longer, six dollars less, different brand.

None of that is a criticism of a shop for stocking more than one supplier. It is how shops work. But it does mean a price comparison has to name the brand on every row, which is what the next table does.

Four trips, two receipts

Four common trips, Sim Local's published figures against ours. Sim Local prices were read from the pages linked in each row on 3 November 2026. Our figures were read from our live product feed the same day and are the VIP prices you pay through the links in this post.

Three things that table does not say, and should.

The Europe row is not comparing identical coverage. Sim Local's Europe plan lists 36 countries; ours lists 33, Türkiye among them. If your itinerary includes a country on their list and not ours, the row stops being a like-for-like and you should check both their Europe page and our destinations list before buying anything.

The Japan row is gigabyte for gigabyte. Both are 5GB for 30 days. If 10GB is closer to your usage, the Japan page listed Sim Local's 10GB for 30 days at US$16.25, and ours was $7.95 on the same day's feed read. Our Japan plans are sold on NTT DoCoMo, KDDI or SoftBank, and the plan names the network.

The 20GB Europe row is the closest Sim Local gets. At US$22.50 for 20GB over 31 days, the Orange plan is the cheapest 20GB Europe month on the page, well under Sim Local's own 20GB for 30 days at US$39.50, and the gap to our $15.95 is $6.55 rather than twenty. It lists 44 countries and includes calls and texts, which ours does not, so it is not a like-for-like row either. It gets there through a partner brand rather than Sim Local's own.

The unlimited tiers: price the day, not the word

"Unlimited" is the most load-bearing word in this category and it never means what it says. Both providers run a daily full-speed allowance; the useful question is how big the day is and what happens after it.

Sim Local's unlimited Europe plans are sold with a stated full-speed allowance of 5GB or 10GB a day. Ours give 1GB or 3GB a day at full speed and then drop to a reduced rate, printed on the individual plan, until the next day resets it. The plan keeps working either way; it just gets slow.

That is a trade rather than a clean win. Our 90GB plan is $15.55 cheaper for the month than their 5GB-a-day plan, about 26% lower, and gives 3GB a day instead of 5GB. Our 30GB plan is cheaper again and gives a single gigabyte a day. Ours is the cheaper month. Theirs is the bigger day.

Which of those you want depends on one question: do you ever spend 5GB in a day? For most travellers the answer is no, and a 1GB or 3GB daily allowance is headroom they never reach. For somebody tethering a laptop through eight-hour work days, uploading footage or streaming in the evening, it is not, and the daily number is the only number that matters. There is a longer treatment of how the daily reset behaves in our unlimited data guidelines.

Sim Local's shorter unlimited durations are priced at US$30.25 for 7 days and US$50.25 for 15 days on the 10GB-a-day tier. Its 5GB-a-day tier was US$42.25 for 15 days. Ours at 15 days is $15.95 for the Europe 15GB Unlimited plan, which is 1GB a day, then 128 kbps.

Paying for the counter

It is worth being precise about what the premium on the earlier rows pays for, because it is not nothing.

A shop in a terminal gives you a person who can look at your handset, tell you it is carrier-locked or eSIM-incapable, and sell you a physical SIM instead. A vending machine gives you the same thing at an hour when no shop is open. A card terminal takes payment when your bank has flagged the foreign website you just tried to buy from. These are real failure modes, and travel retail exists because they happen.

The arithmetic worth doing is when they happen. All of those problems are discoverable at home, for free, in the ten minutes before you pack. Device compatibility is a settings screen, not a mystery. Apple's eSIM setup guide covers what an iPhone needs, and it has a separate page on using one abroad; most recent flagship phones that are not carrier-locked take a profile, and the phone's settings will tell you. An eSIM bought before you fly is installed, dormant and waiting, and it connects while you are still taxiing. One bought at the counter requires you to have landed, found the shop, and queued behind the flight that landed before yours.

That is the whole of it. Sim Local charges for solving a problem at the moment it is most expensive to solve. We charge less for solving it in advance, and the difference on a Europe month was $19.55.

What this comparison does not measure

Four gaps, deliberately left open.

• Customer support. Not response times, not channels, not quality, for them or for us. We hold no controlled, like-for-like dataset on support resolution for any provider in this category, our own included, so any comparison we published would be a story rather than a measurement.
• Network speed on the ground. Throughput depends on the local operator, the tower, the hour and your handset. Neither provider owns towers: both depend on local operators' networks, and neither of us can promise what a specific street in Lisbon will deliver on a Friday night.
• Sim Local's full catalogue. It is a multi-brand shop with a large and shifting shelf, including plans with phone numbers, physical SIMs and country-specific operators. We priced four trip profiles on its own-brand and partner-brand pages. There will be plans on that site we did not open.
• Non-dollar pricing and in-store prices. Sim Local lists prices in pounds and euros as well as dollars, and sells across a counter. We quoted its US-dollar web prices. A shop-floor price or a sterling price may not convert to the figures above.

Every one of those is checkable by you, and both providers publish their destination lists and prices without requiring an account.

The arrivals-hall maths

Sim Local is a good shop that has been in the right buildings for fifteen years, and the eSIM is the newest thing on its shelf rather than the reason it exists. If you want the version of this where somebody hands you a working phone, it is a long-established place to get it, and the price reflects the building it is handed to you in.

What we sell is the same data profile without the building. On the trips priced here that was $19.55 less on a Europe month, $20.05 less on a United States month, and $5.05 less on a Japan month. The cost of collecting it is four minutes on a website before you leave home, which is the real comparison: not us against them, but the ten minutes before you pack against the twenty minutes after you land.

Check the figures against their pages and ours before you buy either. Prices in this category move, and a comparison post is only as good as the day it was last read.